


Unnamed Captain America/Pacific Rim Fusion

by Lyaka



Category: Captain America (Movies), Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Evil Author Day, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-29 09:45:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17805692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyaka/pseuds/Lyaka
Summary: Dropping into a Jaeger is like nothing Steve’s ever felt before. It’s like he’s shed his problems, his disabilities, his entire skin, and been born anew as the man he’d always wanted to be. It’s like the growth spurt Bucky still kept promising him would come along one day. It’s like being born again.It’s like freedom. In here, his size truly doesn’t matter.An unfinished work in progress posted for Evil Author Day.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written a loooong time ago - not long after I finished [devil](), before Captain America: The Winter Soldier or any of the subsequent movies had come out, and certainly before the Pacific Rim sequel came out. It's definitely not canon-compatible with any of those (and it's a fusion anyway). It also hadn't been beta'd or significantly edited, so there may be the occasional wonkiness.
> 
> If what you read here interests you, please let me know! I'm happy to answer any questions, and who knows? Maybe I'll be inspired!

Steve drove the last support rod home, switched off his power driver, and paused to wipe his forehead.

The sun was high overhead, halfway through beta shift, and Steve was sweaty and grimy. Of course, that wasn’t anything special; everyone who worked on the Wall was filthy. It was filthy work, and he’d gotten used to that a long time ago. There was the slick of oil dripping out of power tools that were too old to seal but remained in use because there were no replacements. There was the smell of his fellow workers, who, like Steve, bathed once a week in rotation because water was too scarce and needed for more important things, like drinking and cooling, to waste on anything more than the bare minimum needed for hygiene. There was the blood and grime under Steve’s fingernails from breaking them open against the Wall, against failing tools as he tried to keep them working for one more shift, against the harness that might keep him safe if he fell. Since the first kaijuu had come through the breach, four years ago, everything had been in short supply. Earth simply didn’t have the manufacturing capacity any more to provide replacements, either for the tools as a whole or for the faulty gaskets. So instead the oil and the coolant and every other fluid went to waste, drip by drip, as humanity ran a futile race against entropy.

Steve should really have been used to it. But some days, if he wasn’t careful, the sheen of sweat condensing on his skin would suddenly transmute into the cool touch of the fluid that used to fill the cockpit of his Jaeger in battle. The sound of power tools would echo the hydraulics of a million-ton robotic exoskeleton, and the head-mounted display that functioned as a construction aid would blur and fade into the cockpit readouts beamed into his optic nerve through his pilot’s implant during drift. He’d be back there, trapped in the broken shell of the Jaeger he’d piloted for two years, staring blankly at the missing space where his copilot was supposed to be. Had been, only seconds ago, before the kaijuu –

The drift specialist at Allied Shatterdome had sworn that Steve had escaped full-blown drift psychosis, despite the violent end to his piloting career. But Steve still had flashes occasionally, and he’d rather go through a dozen rags a day mopping up sweat than lose himself running through the corridors of his mind, screaming for a partner who wasn’t there anymore. So he wiped his forehead, took those memories and buried them down deep, along with all the rest. The innocent smiles of children, the inexperienced fumbling of two pubescent boys, the adult embraces at night in their quarters when the lights in the Shatterdome were low. Shoved them all down in the empty grave where the marker read _James Buchanan Barnes._

Then he picked up his tools and moved on to the next set of supports. 

“I think that’s done it for this segment,” Peggy Carter said half an hour later, consulting their work order for the day. She was in charge of their three-man team, and now she looked back down the Wall and nodded in satisfaction. “We can move on to Zone Eight. We’re only marked down for the first ten struts, but we’re ahead – maybe we can do the full dozen today.”

“Let’s go for it,” Steve agreed.

Here on the Wall, sob stories were a dime a dozen; Steve wasn’t anything special. Everyone had some reason they were here pouring their lives into the Wall. Peggy worked her power driver next to Steve on behalf of her grandmother, Marlena, who was crushed under her 34th Street brownstone when the first kaijuu hit New York. Clint, the third member of their work crew, was also doing it for his family. There had once been a lot of them, parents and cousins and a brother named Barney. They’d all been killed in the kaijuu rampage after Genosha Shatterdome fell. Now Clint spent every shift up high in an aerial rig laying capstones after Steve and Peggy drove the supports. It was the most dangerous part of a dangerous job, but Clint didn’t care about the heights.

(Steve remembered watching the kaijuu advancing on Genosha from the relative safety of Allied Shatterdome. A lifetime ago, he’d been a Jaeger pilot, he and Bucky together, and Allied had been their home base. He’d watched the screens with his fellow pilots in horror as the kaiju tore through Genosha’s Jaegers like paper dolls and crushed the Shatterdome with a single swipe of its tail.)

Now Bucky was dead and Steve was working on the Wall. And a thousand meters overhead, Clint spent his days hoping the rig didn’t break out from under him, dump him a thousand meters to the ground and end his hopes and his pain both. It would happen one day, if Clint kept going up there; the accidental death rate for aerial workers was at nearly twenty-five percent annually, and Clint had been doing this job since the very beginning of the Wall project. The numbers weren’t in his favor.

It wasn’t even that Clint didn’t know it. He just kept going up there because his work on the Wall was all he had left, his tribute to his dead family and his faith that he could do something to prevent someone else’s family from suffering the same fate. Clint thought that was worth the risk.

As a Jaeger pilot Steve had lived with death’s potential every day. His own death, the death of his fellow pilots, the death of civilians. Now Steve just hoped he’d be somewhere else if Clint’s rig finally broke. Even if Clint truly thought the Wall was worth dying for, he’d still scream as he fell.

Today wasn’t that day, though. Instead, the shift-change klaxon sounded. Alpha shift was off duty, beta shift could take an hour, and gamma shift was on duty. Clint descended from the heights, alive and well. Peggy whistled cheerfully as she helped unhook him. Even Steve smiled a little. It was nice to beat their daily goals.

“Dinnertime,” Clint proclaimed happily, and Steve let himself be swept up in the alpha shift mess hall rush.

* * *

Every day on the Wall was more or less the same. Wake up, eat, work, eat, sleep. If you got up a little early or stayed up a little late, there was time to talk to your fellow workers. Some folks liked to play a game of cards or toss a ball around. Despite the rationing growing ever stricter, underground stills turned out a decent beverage if your aim was getting drunk. Most of the public access terminals worked more than half the time, so you could surf the web if that was your poison.

Steve didn’t usually bother. He preferred working out and solitude. Fortunately, the two things went hand-in-hand on the Wall; few people would spend a twelve-hour shift doing what amounted to manual labor then want to go back for a little recreational exertion. Unlike everyone else on the Wall, though, Steve didn’t take his physical shape for granted. He wasn’t that far removed from the skinny kid with the lung problems who got stuck on the ground floor every time the elevator was down for maintenance.

He let the chatter in the mess hall wash over him as he stood in line with the rest of alpha shift, though he tried to always muster a smile for the men and women preparing the food. The support workers were fighting the kaijuu too, in their own way. Maybe they weren’t physically fit enough to be running power tools on the Wall, or doing containment on the ground after a kaijuu, or climbing into a Jaeger. But they were contributing all the same. Over half of them were children. The kids seemed younger to Steve every day, but in a few more years some of them would be called up to other postings. Some of them might even end up in the Jaeger pilots’ corps. Unless the War ended, of course.

Peggy caught Steve’s eye as he emerged from the dinner line and waved him over. She and Clint had somehow squeezed in on the end of one of the long tables that lined the mess, and Steve couldn’t tell where he was supposed to sit unless Peggy thought Steve was going to become one with the cinderblocks, but he went over anyway. He knew, in the part of his mind that liked to sound like Sister Mary Clarence sometimes, that too much solitude wasn’t actually good for him. He was conscientious about making an effort, checking it off like instructions – eat with others, talk with others, watch the news – and one of his rules was that when Peggy invited him to something, he went along, unless he had a good reason not to. And he didn’t today; no injuries on-shift, everything going more or less according to schedule.

So he took his tray over, pasted on a smile, and said “Evening, everyone.”

The various people within earshot murmured polite responses before largely going back to their own conversations. Peggy raised an eyebrow, and next to her, Clint deployed surprisingly pointy elbows. Someone down the bench wisely decided they were done anyway (“Jesus Christ, Barton, you could just _ask_ ”) and Steve slid into the newly available spot. “Evening,” he repeated, this time just to Clint and Peggy. 

As a kid, he would’ve been able to squeeze into the small spaces between bodies. As a pilot, he’d been first in line for the new steroids that had finally cured his asthma and beefed up his lungs, overcoming a lifelong weakness left over from his premature birth. Freed from that constraint, he’d started in trying to do for his body in the gym and training rooms what puberty had apparently forgotten. It wasn’t until he’d hit the Wall that he’d really taken off. Between daily labor and nightly workouts, he’d added muscle, shot up ten inches, and finally grown into his feet.

“Good shift today,” Peggy said. Steve nodded, mouth already full. They’d done 110% of their daily goal; not quite a new team best, but more than enough reason to celebrate. 

“Let’s keep it up,” Clint said from her other side. He was half-turned on the bench, craning his neck for a better angle on one of the giant TVs that littered the mess. Steve avoided following Clint’s eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about what was going on – he did – but the unrelenting tenor of the news cycle wasn’t healthy.

A sudden cheer went up around the room. Clint whooped. Steve glanced up in spite of himself and froze, gaze caught on footage of a Jaeger – one of the new ones, the mark sixes that were just rolling off the lines – pummeling a kaijuu that was wider than a strip mall. Steve couldn’t even identify its class. It was easily twice the size of the _Zola_ -class that had killed Bucky. _Jesus,_ he thought numbly, _no wonder the news is always predicting defeat._ He’d known, intellectually, that the size and strength of kaijuu coming out of the breach had only increased since he’d left the program. He’d heard that even Earth’s reckless pace of R&D couldn’t keep up, though the mark six on the screen looked to be doing a fine job. But the reason it was the mark six and not the mark five was because the mark fives had deployed with an engineering flaw that had wiped out half of them in the first year of service. It had been after Steve’s time – when he’d left the service, the mark fours had been relatively new – but the news had covered it extensively, and Steve hadn’t yet learned to look away from the screens. The mark five’s cockpit had deviated from the spherical design common to the previous four Jaeger models. Smaller, which had been the whole point – the extra space saved had let the Jaeger carry new, heavier ordnance – and differently shaped, with angles and buttressing meant to offset the loss of the sphere’s inherent structural integrity. It had seemed okay in the labs, but in the field…

Steve had avoided the mess hall for a month after that news had broken. The mark fives had been recalled after the first combat casualties, but some Shatterdomes had been simply stretched too thin to comply. For three months until the mark sixes could be rushed into service, at hotspots around the world, it had been the mark five or nothing. Pilots had dropped into those Jaegers because it was civilians or them. And the news had covered it all. Every structural integrity failure. Everybody pulled out of the wreckage. Hearing about it afterwards from Clint was bad enough; Steve thanked God regularly that he’d never had to see footage of the twisted remains of a Jaeger with its cockpit crumpled like tissue paper, knowing firsthand what that would have meant for the pilots trapped inside. His mind’s eye would have populated the image with all of the pilots he’d known at Allied – Dugan and Falsworth, Morita and Jones, Dernier and Weaving. And Bucky, of course.

“Steve?” Peggy said softly beside him.

Steve tore his gaze away from the television and focused on his plate. Potatoes on the fork. Fork to the mouth. Chew. Swallow. No more thinking.

“Steve, what’s wrong?”

Around them, Wall workers were on their feet. Clint was among them, hollering encouragement at the Jaeger on the screen. Steve kept his eyes down and shook his head. “I’m fine.”

A massive cheer went up from the room, cutting off any answer Peggy might have made, and Steve glanced up involuntarily. On the screen, the Jaeger was checking the kaijuu to certify death. It was over.

“ _Steve_ ,” Peggy hissed under the noise. “You – ”

She was interrupted by Clint, who flopped down into the space between them, breaking their gaze and the moment. “That was amazing,” he said excitedly. “Didja see it?”

“Uh…” Steve began, glancing nervously at Peggy’s _I’m-not-done-with-you_ expression.

“Yeah!” another worker – Lewis – said excitedly from across the table. She leaned forward. “The way it used the new pulse guns! Really kept the kaijuu away from civilian targets – ” 

“The other Jaeger was using one too,” Clint jumped in. Steve blinked; he hadn’t even noticed a second Jaeger, though, to be fair, he hadn’t been looking. “And they were using it to herd the kaijuu – ”

“Right? When it was headed for that bank – ”

“Looked like there was a continuous fire mode on the pulse rifle, you could use it like setting up a force field – ”

Steve took the opportunity to go back to his food, letting Clint and Darcy’s chatter wash over him and distract Peggy. They were deep into a discussion of how the apparently new pulse rifle and its purported continuous fire mode could revolutionize kaijuu containment, and, despite the fact that they were extrapolating from a few seconds of newsreel footages and a mutual obsession with reading outdated Jaeger technical manuals on the Internet, the conversation was well-reasoned and on point. Steve would bet anything that the exact same discussion was going on between pilot teams at every Shatterdome around the world.

“But what about power?” Peggy was demanding from Clint’s other side. She, too, was something of a closet Jaeger fangirl. To her credit she’d never pushed Steve for anything he wasn’t willing to give, even though it must have been a temptation. “You’d burn through your fuel cell awfully quickly like that.”

“So?” Darcy scoffed.

“ _So_ a Jaeger needs power for other things too – you know, like _oxygen_ – ”

“Even if the power goes out there’s enough oxygen profusing the fluid in the cockpit for three or four hours,” Clint said authoritatively. “That’s one of the points of having the pilots breathe fluid instead of atmo.”

“And it lets them handle pressure differentials better,” Darcy chimed in. “Not to mention the drift benefits!” 

“All right, but without power the Jaeger doesn’t move, either! They’re stuck out of the fight!”

Steve flinched, huddling over his tray a little more. Peggy sounded just like Maria Hill, his old CO at Allied Shatterdome. Steve had heard a variation on this rant after every other mission, it seemed like, Hill always irate at the way her pilots never seemed to grasp the larger tactical realities. Steve caught himself wondering how Hill had died and shook his head, forcing his attention back to his mashed potatoes.

Clint, meanwhile, rolled his eyes. “As long as you’ve gotten the kaijuu out of the way first, who cares? You just chill for a few hours until the rescue teams break you out.”

Steve thought, not for the first time, that Clint would have made a good Jaeger pilot. He was driven, embraced risk, and good at collaboration. But, of course, a pilot needed to be more than that. A pilot needed to be drift-capable. If Clint wasn’t, all the will in the world wouldn’t make a difference.

Another tray dropped down next to Lewis, and Wu’s long legs slid into Steve’s field of vision. “Barton, if you think that’s not a huge waste of resources – how long do you think the Jaeger is out of commission for, after they’ve had to pry the cockpit open manually?”

Something yawning opened up abruptly in Steve’s stomach. For an awful moment, the mess hall was far away, and he was suddenly alone and drowning in a sea of sights and sounds, ill-formed memories and unformed impressions.

_No,_ he told himself fiercely. _No_. He’d spent two days lost in a similar half-awake, half-dreaming state, after his last drift had been broken so traumatically. Doc Foster, the drift specialist at Allied, had had to resort to experimental drugs to snap Steve out of the worst of it. He’d spent a long time afterwards remembering how to be one person in one mind again.

Steve forced himself to open his eyes. _You’re in the mess,_ he reminded himself.  _You’re on the Wall._ There was something buzzing in his ears, and his vision seemed spotty. He’d dropped his fork at some point. But it was getting easier to breathe, and no one seemed to have noticed, thankfully, caught up in the talk about Jaegers and tactics.

Doc Foster had warned him about this. Steve had avoided full-flung drift psychosis as the result of his broken drift, thank goodness, but he’d probably have episodes for the rest of his life. She’d taught him how to deal with them. Breathe evenly. Stay calm. Remove yourself from the situation.

Leaving his tray behind, Steve slid out from behind the bench and left the mess hall. 

Outside, he tipped his head back to look at the dark smudge of the sky – no stars, not with the number of floodlights they had erected so gamma and delta shifts could see – and took some more deep breaths. It had been a long time since something had gotten to him like that, but something about the mental image of rescue crews swarming over a downed Jaeger, prying their way into a fused cockpit, draining the fluid to find –

Steve swallowed. _I wasn’t even conscious. I’m not actually remembering it. It’s just images from the tv, just my imagination. That wasn’t even how it happened – the cockpit was torn open, the fluid already drained –_

“Do you miss it?” Peggy’s voice said beside him.

Steve jumped nearly out of his skin, twisting around to stare at her. It took him a moment to process that she’d asked him a question. “ _Miss_ it?” Steve blurted in unvarnished surprise.

“Being a pilot.” Peggy shrugged, hunching her shoulders under her jacket a little. It _was_ chilly outside, not that Steve had noticed until just now. He hadn’t even noticed her coming up next to him. “Every time a Jaeger comes up on the screens, it’s the same discussions. Everyone here thinks pilots are god’s gift to humanity. But when they get going, you always slip out. I wondered if you were missing it.”

“No,” Steve said fiercely. He shook his head, trying to convince her, trying to blink away the phantom image of Bucky’s grin, Bucky’s determination, Bucky’s scream in Steve’s mind when the kaijuu had torn him out of the cockpit. “God, no.”

“Okay,” Peggy said cautiously. “If you’re sure.” She didn’t look like she believed him.

“I’m sure,” Steve said again. She knew he occasionally had flashes – she’d sat with him through a bad one shortly after his arrival on the Wall – but that didn’t make him comfortable sharing them. Maybe from her point of view, they looked like nostalgia. In a weird way, maybe they were…

“I’m just tired,” he said, trying to smile. “I’m going to go get some sleep.”

Peggy looked like she wanted to say something else, but after a moment, she just nodded. “Have a good night, then.”

“Night,” he muttered, and went back to his dorm.

* * *

When Steve dreamed, it was always about the same thing.

(The day Bucky died, he’d already been in the drift bay when Steve arrived, suiting up with hands that shook, and they’d checked each other’s helmets in silence before dropping into the drift pool. They always held hands when they dropped, Bucky’s left in Steve’s right, and that time their grip had been tight enough to bruise.)

Mostly he didn’t. Working on the Wall helped. It exhausted him so he could sleep without nightmares, or worse, without the half-drift that he keeps sliding into. Doc Foster had warned Steve about dreams. Because his last drift ended so abruptly, his mind was left still balanced on the edge; reaching out for Bucky, trying to reestablish the connection.

_Bucky’s dead,_ he reminded himself savagely when he woke up in the middle of the night, right hand clenching on empty air, traitorous mind reaching out for his other half. _The kaiju tore him in half._

(When the rescue teams dragged him out of the remains of _Howling Commando_ , Steve had still been holding Bucky’s hand. Bucky’s whole left arm was still in the cockpit with Steve, up to the shoulder, ripped out of the joint by the kaijuu that had killed him. They had cremated it in the Shatterdome’s incinerator the next morning, while recorded music played and Steve watched, unable to speak or move. Afterwards, Doc Foster gave him a sedative. It was the last good sleep he’d had until he’d fetched up at the Wall and learned to bury his memories under work.)

Doc Foster would’ve said that the dreams were Steve’s mind trying to work through the trauma of his broken drift.  He wished he could consult her again, ask why he was still having episodes twelve months after Bucky’s death, when her diagnosis had been that he’d avoided drift psychosis. But Doc Foster had been killed only a few short months after Bucky, when Allied Shatterdome had fallen against the combined assault of three simultaneous kaijuu. They hadn’t had enough warning to evacuate – the early warning systems were still in their infancy, then – and there had been no survivors.

He could have consulted another drift specialist, Steve supposed. There was at least one at every Shatterdome. Drift-capable pilots were the limiting factor in the growth of the Jaeger program, after all, and losing pilots to drift psychosis would further constrain the supply. Any Shatterdome would take him in and treat him, even though he was useless as a pilot now in the wake of Bucky’s death. But that was the problem. He was useless, and he knew it. And though he hadn’t exactly kept in touch with anyone in the program – after Allied had fallen, he hadn’t really known anyone to keep in touch _with_ – he could tell just from the news broadcasts that they were being stretched thin. They shouldn’t waste resources on him.

Besides, he didn’t need to drift to work on the Wall, so what did it really matter?

* * *

Rumors spread faster on the Wall than anything else, even the lice. Usually even so-called news didn’t deserve the name; it was a mishmash of things hoped for and things feared, and usually so divorced from reality that no one over the age of five could have believed it. Sometimes they got something more plausible, but Steve was usually able to tell fact from fiction. It helped that he’d spent two years on the pointy end of the spear. Jaeger pilots theoretically didn’t have any higher of a need-to-know than any soldier on the ground in Europe, but somehow it always worked out that secrets never stayed that way within a Shatterdome.

What greeted Steve today wasn’t a rumor. It was News with a capital N. The informational programs that ran 24/7 on the TVs in the mess proclaimed it, the online sites apparently confirmed it, and everyone was talking about it: the World Security Council was pulling the plug on the Jaeger program.

Steve had had a bad night – not surprising, after last night’s episode – and chosen to skip breakfast, since his stomach had a habit of rebelling under too much stress, and the food on the Wall was bad enough going _down_. So Steve heard the news first from Clint, who filled he and Peggy in as they collected their tools at shift start and moved out to their assigned section. Apparently two more Shatterdomes had fallen in the last week, Triskelion Shatterdome in Washington, DC and Red Shatterdome in Moscow, both with massive casualties. Their destruction had been kept hush-hush at first to avoid spreading panic, but now it was out of the bag.

“And the WSC has said enough,” Clint finished, reaching up to hook his harness into the safety system. The self-checks lit green, indicating a solid lock, and he gave the connection an extra tug just to be sure.  “They say the Jaeger program is costing more than it’s worth, and Earth’s resources can be better used elsewhere.”

Steve frowned. It was true that over the last three years Shatterdomes had been threatened more often, as the kaijuu started to pinpoint the source of their most effective bane. And while Steve only knew what he saw on the news – any real contacts he’d had in the Jaeger program had died with Allied Shatterdome – he’d lived and breathed piloting long enough to read between the lines. He saw the geographical patterns of kaijuu attacks that increasingly focused on the Shatterdomes. He heard the rumors (all too believable, alas) of Earth’s steadily dwindling manufacturing capability. And anyone could spot that the new ration rules were aimed at products that relied on certain raw materials.

It all added up to the same thing. The Jaeger program was struggling. They were losing ground faster than they could rebuild – pilots, Jaegers, Shatterdomes – and the combined loss of Triskelion and Red left gaping holes in the global network. Jaegers had been humanity’s savior for the last five years, but the kaijuu were beginning to gain the upper hand.

“Still, cancelling it?” Peggy said dubiously, as she and Steve picked up their power drivers and moved out behind Clint. “What are they going to replace it with?”

“The Wall, of course!” Clint said confidently, turning to call down to them as the rig started to lift him aloft. “This section’s nearly done. The other sections must be farther along than we realized. The Wall will protect us.”

Peggy and Steve looked at each other, standing at the base of the Wall. “Steve,” Peggy said cautiously, once Clint was high enough to be out of earshot. “You’ve seen more of what the kaijuu are capable of... will the Wall be enough?”  
  
Steve hesitated for a moment. Partly it was because he didn’t want to remember what kaijuu were capable of. He avoided thinking of that time in his life as much as possible, though sometimes shoving it away felt like a betrayal, of himself and his fellow Jaeger pilots. The living, the dead, and, especially, Bucky. And partly he hesitated because, once he made himself really think about it, he knew the answer he would have to give.

_No. The Walls will stop a smaller kaijuu, sure. And those still do come through the breach from time to time. It’s worth building so we don’t have to send Jaegers out after every_ Obadiah _-class that shows up. But against a_ Hydra _-class or a_ Loki- _class, the Wall won’t do a thing._

Steve really didn’t want to give that answer. He wanted to give Peggy something better than the truth, something more like hope. Peggy was one of the few who even knew that Steve had once been a Jaeger pilot. She’d been good to him when he’d first arrived on the Wall, helped him find something like peace in the work when he’d been so torn up inside it was a wonder he could put one foot in front of the other. She deserved more than to hear that her work on the Wall, her tribute to her dead grandmother, was a waste of time that wouldn’t do anybody any good without a Jaeger to back it up.

Peggy was no fool, though, and she’d been working with Steve for going on two years now, seen Steve at one of his lowest points. She watched the conflict play out over his face, and as Steve opened his mouth to lie to her, she sighed and shook her head. “That’s what I was afraid of.” 

“Peggy – ” Steve started, then stopped, helplessly. Even if he’d tried lying, he was afraid she’d’ve seen right through it. Bucky had always said Steve had never had much of a poker face. 

“Don’t worry about it, Steve,” she said gently, picking up her tool and turning away towards her section of the Wall. “I know you would have tried.”

Steve, watching her go, felt more helpless than he had in a long time.

“I see the panic has already started,” a voice said behind Steve.

Steve startled, the way only someone with the hair-trigger reflexes of eighteen months in a Shatterdome could startle, and spun around so fast he nearly dropped his power driver. “Jesus Christ,” he said involuntarily. Then his jaw fell.

The man standing there was dressed like more or less everyone else on the Wall, warm, sturdy, shapeless clothes faded to a variety of drab browns and greys by repeated industrial washings. His posture wasn’t military straight, but rather stooped slightly, weary and exhausted. He wore shaded eye protection. Nothing about him was out of the ordinary. No one else, passing by on the way to their work stations, gave him a second glance.

But Steve recognized him. They’d never met personally, but no one who had been a pilot would fail to recognize the head of the Jaeger program. 

Nick Fury was famous. He’d been the one who had seen the potential of drift technology and funded Howard and Maria Stark’s early research. He’d used his contacts to find the supplies for the first, prototype Jaeger, no mean feat in the early days of the Kaijuu War when every nation on Earth was scrambling madly for men and materials. And he’d been the one to sell the World Security Council on an entire fleet of Jaegers, a network of Shatterdomes, a corps of pilots fitted with implants and connected to their Jaegers and each other in drift.

“You’re a hard man to get in contact with, Captain Rogers,” Fury said chidingly, while Steve stood there with his mouth open and tried not to stare. “Don’t you ever check your email?”

“My…” Steve shut his mouth. “Not really, no.”

“Hmm.” Fury looked around. His gaze took in the power tool Steve was holding, the laborer’s clothes, the utility belt and safety harness. And it lingered on Steve’s left temple, where the external plate of his pilots’ implant should have been visible, exposed and ready to be brought alive by contact with drift fluid. Instead the implant was hidden completely by Steve’s shaggy hair. “No, I guess you wouldn’t,” Fury agreed. “Guess I wouldn’t either, if I were running away.”

“I’m not running away,” Steve said reflexively. Then he blinked, registering what an odd opening to the conversation that was. Just as odd, come to think of it, as the legendary head of the Jaeger program turning up on the Wall, unannounced, and talking to Steve. “Why are you here?”

“What else do you call this, then?” Fury said chidingly, ignoring Steve’s question. “You’re a Jaeger pilot. Kaijuu are coming through the breach faster than ever. Bigger kaijuu, too. They’ve come up with three new class names in the last two years. Shatterdomes are starting to go down under the load. We can’t keep up. And you’re here, playing Fix-It Felix.” He waved at the construction going on, then gestured to Steve. “I’d sure call that running away.”

Steve took a deep breath. “I’m not a pilot anymore,” he said as steadily as he could. “And even if I were, I wouldn’t do you any good.” Fury _must_ have seen Steve’s file, after all. After Bucky’s death, Steve had traveled to every Shatterdome still standing, drift-tested with every other pilot in the service. Every test had come back negative. In pilots’ parlance, Steve was a one-and-done – drift-compatible with only one other person.

And Bucky was dead, which made Steve useless.

“Once a pilot, always a pilot,” Fury said, apparently disagreeing. And, since even Nick Fury couldn’t change the laws of drift science, this meant that he had something else up his sleeve.

Steve wasn’t interested in finding out what it was. “I’ve been through this before. Phillips tried to get me to come back to Lehigh Trainingdome, after all my drift tests failed. But it’s not for me. I wouldn’t be any good at it.”

“Not so sure,” Fury said ruminatively, “but regardless, that’s not what I want from you. I want you to pilot.”

“I _can’t_ pilot,” Steve said, frustrated. Surely Fury knew that – “you _have_ read my file?”

“The way I see it, we have two problems.” Fury held up two fingers, folding one down. “The first is that you’re a one-and-done, and your copilot’s dead. And two,” folding down the remaining finger, “there’s the lack of a compatible Jaeger.”

Steve gritted his teeth. “Seems pretty insurmountable to me,” he ground out.

Fury spread his hands. “What if I told you I could solve both of these problems?” 

“I’d call you a liar.”

Surprisingly, Fury laughed. “Sometimes,” he admitted. “Often, even. But not today.”

Steve shook his head. “It would take a miracle to put me back in a Jaeger,” he said. “ _Two_ miracles. And even if you have them, you shouldn’t spend them on me. I’m not…” he struggled to finish the sentence. “I’m not a pilot anymore,” he said finally, falling back on the mantra that had been repeating in his mind for the last year, ever since he’d bundled up his remaining possessions – and Bucky’s – and left Allied Shatterdome for the last time. “The man I used to be died with my copilot. I’m out. The Wall’s my contribution to the war effort now.” Steve gestured to it, to the thousands of people struggling to build a defense out of sheer hope. “It’s what I’ve got left,” he said, trying to make Fury understand. He _couldn’t_ get back into a Jaeger. Not as he was now. 

Fury was watching him steadily, compassion and rebuke commingled in his one eye. 

Steve couldn’t stand it. “Just leave me alone,” he said, and turned his back.

* * *

Peggy, of course, wanted to know where he’d been for the last ten minutes. Steve didn’t have a good answer, or at least not one he wanted to give, so he just shook his head and flipped on his power driver. She gave him a look that said _I’m not letting this go,_ but gave him his space for the moment. Steve was grateful for that. He threw himself into the work, imagining each support punching through Nick Fury, through a kaijuu, through the whole damned war.

“Steve,” Peggy said to him quietly during one of the moments when both their drivers were off, waiting for Clint to finish muscling a capstone in place. “That man you were talking to looked an awful lot like the head of the Jaeger program, didn’t he?”

Steve grimaced. He should’ve known Peggy would recognize Fury. “Yeah,” Steve admitted, “that was him.”

“What did he want?” she asked. 

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Steve…”

  
“I _don’t_ ,” Steve said mulishly, trying to ignore the voice in the back of his head that said he was being childish. He was saved by Clint calling down that the capstone was on. “Come on, let’s get the next set of supports.”

He knew he couldn’t dodge Peggy forever. He didn’t really want to, really, just long enough for him to get his head on straight, though who knew how long that would be. It didn’t end up mattering. When they turned in their equipment at the end of the shaft and started towards the mess, there, leaning against the wall outside of the dorms, was Nick Fury again.

“The problem is pilots,” Fury said, apparently deciding to bypass the pleasantries and go right to business. “You know it’s always been pilots.”

Clint glanced between Steve and Fury, looking interested. He’d always been fascinated with the Jaeger program, and any minute now he was going to recognize Fury, too. Steve groaned inwardly.

“Did you know that there are only five known survivors of the first two waves of Jaeger pilots?” Fury went on.

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Peggy taking Clint by the arm and hustling him away. His eyes were bright with excitement as he looked back at Steve and Fury; Peggy’s glance was apologetic. Steve blessed her silently for the privacy even as he resigned himself to the fact that Clint was about to learn every secret Steve had.

“Five,” Fury repeated with emphasis. “Out of every man and woman who ever climbed into a mark one or mark two Jaeger.”

“Then get one of them,” Steve said sharply. “I’m done.”

“Unfortunately, none of them are combat-capable anymore,” he said without a trace of irony. Steve eyeballed him darkly and thought that Fury, one of said survivors, looked pretty damn capable to him. “And none of them are familiar with the layout of the mark three’s cockpit, or its capabilities. I’d much rather have you.”

“Why do you care? There aren’t any mark threes left in service – ” he cut himself off abruptly as Fury’s smile widened.  _Shit. Walked right into that one, huh, Rogers?_

“As it happens, I’ve been working on a little side project.” To his credit, Fury managed to keep from sounding smug. “A lot of damaged Jaegers have been coming my way over the last two years. One of them wasn’t so damaged as it appeared.” The bastard managed a rueful sigh. “Unfortunately, by the time I got her operational, there wasn’t a single type one piloting team left in the program.” 

Steve nodded in unwilling sympathy. The limiting factor in the growth of the Jaeger program had always been that they couldn’t find drift-compatible pilot teams fast enough to keep up with the rate of attrition. Jaegers were more durable than the fragile humans who operated them, and they could be fixed in ways flesh and bone could not.

Even more to the point, just because two pilots were compatible didn’t mean they had the same implant. Jaeger specializations could be changed – Steve himself had originally qualified on the mark two before the mark threes had debuted – but implants were permanent. The mark threes, new when Steve and Bucky had been commissioned into _Howling Commando,_ had been being replaced with the mark fours even before Bucky’s death. The mark fours were the debut of the new type two pilots’ implant. The type two was safer in drift, allowed better symbiosis of man and machine, and added additional channels of communications between pilots and from pilot to base.

It was also utterly incompatible with the type one implant. Which had left Steve and Bucky, and the few survivors from the earlier generation of Jaeger pilots, unable to upgrade to the new Jaeger technology. Unwilling to give up the fight, they’d continued to take out the ever-dwindling supply of mark three and earlier Jaegers until they, and their Jaegers, had all been rendered – to borrow Fury’s euphemism – ‘unfit for combat’.

Leading to a situation now where Fury had a working mark three Jaeger and no one to operate it.

“The problem is pilots,” Steve repeated dully.

“Look,” Fury said, tone conciliatory, “Don’t think I don’t know what I’m asking of you. But we’re stretched thin, and I’m running out of options. I need your help.”

Steve shook his head, reeling, and reached for something to rebut with. He remembered the morning’s news and grabbed for it like a lifeline. "Why are you asking me this now? The Jaeger program's disbanding."  
  
"The WSC is making a big mistake." Fury lowered his voice, pitching it to keep from the ears of the other workers moving around them. "You and I both know this Wall ain't gonna stop a real kaijuu. We need to be ready when it fails. I've been concentrating our remaining resources. Moving all surviving Jaegers and pilots to SHIELD Shatterdome. I’m hoping that includes you.” Fury’s one-eyed gaze is challenging. “Are you still a pilot, Steve Rogers? Or are you a sheep, working on a placebo Wall, waiting to die?”

"Being _a_ pilot isn’t enough," Steve said bitterly, thinking of Bucky, of his own futile search for a copilot. “You need a _set_ of pilots – drift-compatible – and I’ve only got one.” He gestured at himself ironically. “All right, you’ve got a Jaeger. But I don’t see what good it’s going to do you. I’m not drift-compatible with anyone else. Even you can’t change that.”

“I told you I could solve both of your problems,” Fury said. “You ready to hear about my second miracle?”

Steve shook his head in automatic denial. Fury wasn’t _getting_ it. Unless his miracle was that the laws of drift science were suddenly different, there was simply no way Steve could drift with anyone. He opened his mouth to explain this to Fury _again_ , then stopped suddenly as the breath froze in this throat.

It _was_ impossible. It had to be. He’d gone everywhere, tested with everyone. But there had been no one. No one to justify Fury’s surety that _this_ person, _this_ particular pilot could drift with Steve… no one, unless…

“I just got word,” Fury was saying, apparently having taken Steve’s silence as grounds to continue. “There were survivors from Red Shatterdome – one of the escape transports made it out. They’re headed for Shield ‘dome. And they have the Winter Soldier with them.”

For a moment, all Steve could do was stand there, fighting to look impassive. Keep his feelings off his face, because he could think of was how much he wanted it to be Bucky.  
  
 _Stupid_ , he thought savagely. _Impossible. Bucky's_ dead _, when are you going to_ get  _it –  
  
_ Then his mind caught up with Fury’s words, and he abandoned any attempt at restraint. “He’s _real?_ ” Steve asked, stunned.

“As real as you are.”

The _Winter Soldier_. Steve shook his head, reeling. The man was a ghost – a legend. After Steve’s time, after Allied Shatterdome and several of its sisters had fallen in quick succession to a sudden increase in kaijuu power levels, the rumors of the Winter Soldier had started to circulate. He could pilot any Jaeger, the story went, drift with any copilot. Red Shatterdome was said to be his home – that much, at least, the rumors had apparently gotten right – and his legend had been an inspiration to the entire Pacific Rim. Steve had always thought that was the point of him, that he was propaganda cooked up by the WSC to bolster public morale in the face of the Jaeger program’s sudden vulnerability. He’d never considered that the man might be a reality. Not when the claims of his prowess were so obviously made up. Universal drift compatibility? It was a fairy tale. Steve had always held his tongue, figuring that anything that kept morale up was worthwhile, figuring that that was why the WSC had started the rumor in the first place. But as a former Jaeger pilot he knew – given his search after Bucky’s death, maybe he knew better than any other pilot in the corps – exactly how rare and precious drift compatibility actually was.

He’d seen the numbers, gone and pulled out Howard Stark’s original drift compatibility formulae and pored over the calculations late at night, on the shuttle to yet another Shatterdome. Out of the entire human race, only a tenth of a percent could drift at all. Within that limited group, no one pilot had ever tested drift compatible with more than two other individuals. Most pilots were only compatible with one other – the _one-and-done_ s, like Steve – and almost a quarter of drift- _capable_ pilots were drift- _compatible_ with no one. The public may have thought that materials shortages and manufacturing limitations were what limited the number of Jaegers – Steve had heard that belief echoed repeatedly on the Wall – but it was pilots that were the real scarcity. A pilot who could drift with anyone could have won the war for them.

But here was Nick Fury, staring at Steve with his one good eye, apparently bound and determined to drag Steve back to SHIELD Shatterdome so he could drift with the impossible pilot. Everything about Fury shouted it: the Director believed the rumors. He believed the Winter Soldier could drift with anyone.

Fury believed the Winter Soldier could drift with _Steve_.

Steve stood there with his mouth open and honestly could not think of a single thing to say.

Fury sighed into the silence. “Before you give me your answer,” he said, apparently having missed the part where Steve was about as far from an answer as the Erath was from the Sun, “there’s one more thing you need to know. This is something we’ve gone to a lot of effort to keep out of the rumors, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go spreading it around…”

Steve’s brain sputtered into gear, just in time to send dread through him.

“We don’t know why the Winter Soldier can drift with everyone. But we do know that however he does it, it’s dangerous. Especially to his copilots. The first pilot he drifted with made it eight months before she started to show signs of psychosis. No one else has gone more than two. Some pilots were burnt out after a single drift session.”

Steve stared at Fury in outright horror. The yawning pit opened up again in his stomach, and the world spun around him. He was falling, and Bucky was gone, and he couldn’t breathe.

“Thought you might take it like that.” Fury stuck his hands in his pockets, nodded. The world abruptly fell into place again. Steve closed his mouth, focused on his breathing, and missed the next several things Fury said. His hearing kicked back in just in time for the other man to finish, saying, “But I’ll still be here, when you’re ready.”

Steve blinked, glancing up to see Fury was already turning away. The implications of that sentence took a few extra moments to penetrate, but when they did, they galvanized Steve into finding his voice. “Don’t you have better things to do than hanging around here trying to convince me?” _Like save the world?_

Fury dipped his head. “I surely do.” He turned back long enough to give Steve a grin. “So you’d best make sure I’m not detained here very long.” 

“That’s not – ” Steve protested. “I’m not – ” _the man you think I am. A pilot. Ready. Able. Whole._

He might as well have saved his breath. Fury was gone.

* * *

The ceiling of Steve’s dorm was poured concrete. It had been built along with the rest of this construction post, in a tearing hurry, maybe five years ago. Its builders didn’t want it to stay up for long. Just long enough to finish the Wall. The concrete hadn’t even been sealed; over time, the elements had worried at it, leaving their mark. It was discolored in spots, from water and mold and other, more human stains.

Steve had spent a lot of time staring at it, through sleepless nights and early mornings, nightmares and memories and episodes. He knew each stain by heart. At the moment, he was counting them methodically, over and over again. Distracting himself from the real issue.

The dorm around him was relatively quiet. Wall workers were bunked by shift, and alpha shift was mostly still in the mess, eating. A rumbling in Steve’s stomach reminded him that this was the second meal in a row he was skipping, and he’d done a day’s worth of hard labor in between. He should get up and go to the mess himself. Get something to eat.

He stayed put.

Being alone on the Wall was a rare luxury. Steve didn’t much like it. He was used to being surrounded by lots of other people. Growing up in New York did that to a boy; crowding didn’t get much worse than its sidewalks, parks and subways. Not to mention that the orphanage had always been just the wrong side of full.

If he stretched his mind far back enough, Steve could remember his mom and the small apartment where they’d lived before the drug-resistant TB had swept through the city. He’d never known his father, but he and Ma had been close. Sarah Rogers had been a nurse at Mercy, and some of Steve’s fondest memories were of playing with the other kids at the hospital’s day care during Sarah’s shift before he was old enough for kindergarten, Ma popping in for lunch if it was a light shift and taking him to sit outside and watch the pigeons.

Steve could remember her hugging him goodbye one morning before he walked to elementary school, before the outbreak had really become big enough to hit the newsstands and evening TV. He remembered the sound of her voice over the telephone in the principal’s office when she explained that she wouldn’t be home for a few days, that Mrs. Dietrich next door would be checking in on him, that everything would be fine as long as he did his homework and went straight home after school every day. He didn’t remember the name of the hospital administrator who had called a week later and told him his mother was dead.

The others working on the Wall might have been able to pretend, but Steve knew that the Wall wasn’t anything more than a forlorn hope, right about on par with an eight-year-old’s belief that doing well on his homework would make the drugs magically work on a mutated strain of TB and bring his mother home again. But here he was again going through the motions. What on Earth made him think that this time was going to be any different? Faith wasn’t what changed outcomes; only action could do that.

Leaving the orphanage had taken action. Steve’d only been sixteen, and Bucky, who’d thrown his lot in with Steve’s years ago, fifteen. They could have stayed put for a few more years. But the epidemic had made an awful lot of orphans, many of them younger than them, and Sarah had always taught Steve to be self-reliant and to look for the greater good. It had been Steve who’d put the paperwork together for emancipation, solicited letters of support from their teachers, their supervisors at their part-time jobs, the landlord who would honor Sarah’s old rent-control agreement.

Joining the Jaeger corps had taken action, too. Bucky had gotten his growth spurt and had no trouble enlisting in the regulars, but Steve’s body had somehow never gotten the memo that maybe it was time to stop trying to kill him every time he even thought about playing a sport. He’d tried, and tried, and kept right on trying, until he’d had the good fortune to run across Doc Erskine. The Doc had been who had been looking for new recruits for the then-relatively-new Jaeger program, and he was screening candidates based on mind instead of matter. He’d thought Steve would do the trick.

And fighting had definitely taken action. Every Jaeger drop was act of defiance against the kaijuu. Every drift a conscious decision to expose the most vulnerable part of himself in order to protect innocents, protect the world. Every battle a risk. Worth it, every time. Steve had believed that, right up until he’d lost the one part of himself he’d never even realized he was wagering.

It sounded so stupid in retrospect – if Steve was risking his life with every drop, obviously, so was his copilot – but somehow he’d always thought that, if anything truly bad were to happen, it would happen to him.

“What’s it like?”

Steve jumped, sitting bolt upright and looking around. That had been Peggy’s voice, and after a moment he spotted her; she’d followed him back to the dorm, apparently, and now she sat across from him on Wu’s bunk, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

“Everyone says it’s a rush,” Peggy said. At Steve’s look she clarified; “Dropping. Into a Jaeger. You literally drop, don’t you?” 

“Yeah,” Steve floundered, unsure of where this was going, sure that he didn’t want to find out.

“I’ve always wondered how it worked,” Peggy went on. She was the picture of relaxed, with her casual cross-legged seat and friendly tone. Steve had the sudden flash of certainty that it was all an act. “Do you climb up to the top of the Jaeger and then jump down into the cockpit? Is it already full of drift fluid?”

“What – no,” Steve said, shaking his head. “The drift pools are at the top of the Shatterdome, over the main bay. You suit up there and get in. You sink right away, drift fluid is lighter than water... The pool doors close over your head, and then your entire cockpit is detached from the drift pool. It’s on rails. It literally rolls down them into the Jaeger. That’s why we say ‘drop’.” 

“We?” Peggy asked archly.

Steve flushed. “They.”

She leaned forward, studying his face, then sighed. “Steve, what are you doing here?” 

“Building a Wall.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s good enough for you,” he retorted. “It’s good enough for Clint, and all of these other people.” His wave encompassed the people walking by outside the dorm, on their way to the mess or their bunks, the other buildings on this site, the other sites dotted every fifty miles along the whole expanse of the Wall. “Why isn’t it good enough for me?”

“Because you’re a pilot.” 

“I’m not – “

“It’s not something you _choose_ , Steve,” Peggy cut him off. “It’s not like you woke up one day and said ‘ _Welp, I think I’ll go to pilots’ school._ ’ It’s something that’s in you. Drift capability is what makes a pilot. I don’t have it. Clint doesn’t have it. Don’t you think, if we did, we’d go?”

“Clint certainly would,” Steve sighed, exhausted.

“So would I,” Peggy said.

“You would?” Steve winced. “That’s not what I – it’s not that I doubt you’re brave enough, or anything.”

“I know that.”

“It’s that – “ he broke off, frustrated, and ran his hand through his hair. “When I signed up, it all seemed so easy,” he sighed. “I wanted to help win the war.”

“What’s changed?” Peggy said coolly.

Steve jerked. “Nothing!” 

She gestured. “Yet here you are, standing around at the Wall instead of dropping into a Jaeger.”

“When did you decide Jaegers were what was going to win us the War?” Steve cried. 

“When did you decide that they _weren’t_?” Peggy snapped right back.

Steve came up short, caught by Peggy’s question.

“Tell me,” Peggy said, gently now. “Tell me that you believe that the Jaegers are no longer effective, and I’ll stop. Tell me that you think this Wall can stand up to the biggest, strongest kaijuu, and I’ll never bring this up again. Tell me this isn’t about your personal tragedy.”

Steve opened his mouth to answer, and all of his breath rushed out instead.

Because that was what it came down to, in the end, wasn’t it? All of the things he’d told Fury, told himself, were just excuses. Because he was too scared to see a Shatterdome again. Too broken to drift. Too lost to pilot.

He was shirking. And he’d had to hide that truth from himself, because he’d known, dimly, as far back as the day he’d put his name down as a Wall worker, that if he ever realized it he’d have to leave. He’d have to step back up to his duty, go back to the pilots’ corps. And he wasn’t ready to face his ghosts. _Bucky’s_ ghost.

He’d convinced himself that he was useless. But that was a lie. Even as a one-and-done he had something to offer. Back then he’d thought he couldn’t pilot anymore, but he could’ve trained, and taught, and strategized. Phillips had tried to tell him that. Fury was trying to tell him that. Fury was offering him a new Jaeger, a new copilot, one who was even more damaged than Steve was but who kept on fighting the war anyway.  

And now Peggy was watching him, a sad knowledge in her eyes, proud and resigned at the same time.

“I can’t tell you that,” Steve said. “It wouldn’t be true.”

“I know.”

Steve sighed again, and he felt it all settling back around him. The responsibility. The weight of the drift bay doors sliding closed over his head, surrounding him in the cool dimness of the cockpit. The pressure of drift fluid cradling him, amplifying his connection to his copilot and his Jaeger. It wasn’t something any pilot could ever forget.

Almost automatically his hand came up, touched his left temple, pushing hair aside to stroke the exposed metal plate of his pilots’ implant. Inert in ordinary atmosphere, it came alive when submerged, allowing the drift fluid to transfer Steve’s consciousness into the data network of drift.

Steve’s hair had grown out during the months he’d wandered after Bucky’s death, and by the time he’d gotten to the Wall, the plate hadn’t been visible anymore. It had been easy to pass as an ordinary civilian looking to help. No one thought twice about a shaggy haircut, these days. Certainly no one thought it might be concealing something.

“Peggy?” Steve asked slowly. He let his hand fall.

“Yes, Steve?” She was still watching him compassionately.

Steve squared his shoulders resolutely. “Can you cut my hair?”

* * *

“Well, well,” Fury said approvingly. Steve hadn’t even spoken yet, just walked up to where Fury was waiting, leaning against the wall of the mess as he’d been the night before. Clint and Peggy followed Steve at a discreet distance. But Fury’s eyes flicked straight to Steve’s new military-style haircut, drift plate exposed and visible at his left temple, and he’d gotten the message quick enough.

“I’m in,” Steve told Fury anyway. It was important, somehow, to say it out loud. 

“Good.” Fury’s grin flashed out, suddenly bright in the twilight. “Gather your gear, soldier. I have flight clearance at dawn.”

“You filed for clearance already.” Steve shook his head. “A little presumptuous, wasn’t it, sir?”

“Nah.” Fury rolled one shoulder, pushing off the wall and giving the darkness a nod, more or less where Clint and Peggy were waiting. “I just like to believe the best of people.”

* * *

Packing took almost no time at all. Steve hadn’t carried much away from Allied Shatterdome, and he’d lost rather than gained in material possessions since. Most things weren’t durable enough to stand up to a lifestyle of manual labor. The things Steve still had were the things he cared enough to protect, and when all was said and done, they fit back into his old rucksack with room to spare.

Most of his clothes he left behind. Heavy duty, designed to protect the wearer from stray sparks and falling bits of metal, they would have no place in a Shatterdome. The next refugee to come to the Wall looking for a fresh start would be glad of them, though. Ditto his utility belt and various cargo slings. Steve bundled it all up and took it with him when he went by central dispatch to tell the comptroller he wouldn’t be in anymore. She took his gear with a nod, no questions asked. The Wall was that sort of place. He’d miss that about it.

After that, with nothing else to do, he went over to the next dorm to see how Clint and Peggy were getting on with their packing. On his way back from their little conversation, after Steve had agreed to come with Fury, the Director had mentioned, apparently idly, that – after pilots – trained support staff were the people SHIELD Shatterdome was shortest of. If Steve happened to know anyone who was skilled with a blowtorch and not too afraid to get their hands dirty…

Steve had known what Fury was doing, of course, but it didn’t stop him from glancing back to Peggy and Clint to see if they wanted to come with. Both of them had jumped at the chance to get closer to the actual fight.

When he got there, Peggy’s locker was already hanging open and empty, and a single travel cube was latched and waiting, wheels out, at the foot of her bunk. Peggy herself was nowhere to be seen, but her voice could be heard two rows over, in the vicinity of Clint’s bunk. Steve followed the sound to find her holding up the lid of another travel cube while Clint tossed things in.

“Pretty sure they have their own equipment,” Steve remarked, seeing several empty spaces in Clint’s locker where his own gear had formerly hung. It was technically possible that Clint had turned it back in, of course. But Steve knew for a fact that Clint had nicknamed his welder, at which point, no, probably not.

“Everyone’s operating on a shoestring these days,” Clint argued, and yeah, there was that. “My stuff’s hardly mint, but I know its quirks. No point in starting over.”

“Fair enough.” Steve sat down on Clint’s bunk, suddenly exhausted. Packing hadn’t been a lot of work, but the act of cleaning everything out was so utterly final that he felt wrung out.

It was a lot like leaving the orphanage for the first time – the conscious decision to dismantle the life Steve had been living, pack up everything that made him _him_ and go out to seek a new path. As a kid, Steve’d had to go in front of a judge to petition for formal emancipation. He’d shown that he had a job at a supermarket – closed shop, a good union job – and Bucky was similarly employed down at the docks. Several teachers wrote letters saying that the boys’ grades hadn’t suffered from employment. If they both promised solemnly to stick together and stay in high school and not do drugs and check in with their social worker twice a month…

Looking back, the life Steve and Bucky had built together then had made the two years between emancipation and the breach opening the happiest of Steve’s life. He liked working at the supermarket; he liked his classes and his teachers. His art teacher had helped him put together his portfolio and sent it off to half a dozen art schools. And every other kid in school had been wild with jealously over the fact that he and Bucky didn’t have to dodge a single adult to get post-pubescent with each other at home. 

More importantly, he’d had Bucky for moral support, and if they’d both been a little teary the first night on their own, neither of them had ever told a soul.

“Done,” Clint announced finally. Steve looked up to see Peggy sliding off the travel cube; she’d apparently been sitting on it while Clint snapped it closed. “Hey, Steve, you all packed? Hope so; you look beat.”

“I’m all packed,” he assured his friends.

“Then you’d better get some shut-eye,” Peggy said sensibly. “Wheels up at dawn, remember?”

“Yeah.” He levered himself out of Clint’s bunk, stretched. “Night, everyone.”

“Night,” Clint called, already pulling his own covers back.

Walking back to his own dorm, somehow Steve didn’t think he was going to miss the Wall that much. He looked around the site, watching gamma shift pour out of the mess and start to gear up, and thought that he was done here. Maybe he’d done some good – he’d like to think so, anyway – but someone else would step forward to take over the work. Steve was needed elsewhere, doing something only he could do. 

A long time ago, he’d told Bucky the same thing, when Steve’d realized that his enlistment problems were holding Bucky back from joining up himself. He’d told Bucky to go, to do the work that needed doing, and promised to follow when he could.

Steve hoped that Bucky would have told him the same thing now, if he’d been around to give Steve any advice at all.

He opened the door to his dorm quietly. The lights were out, and most of the bunks were filled with snoring alpha shift workers. Steve slid into his own bunk as soundlessly as possible, not even bothering to get changed, just shucking his boots and rolling onto his back to stare at the ceiling.

Harder to make out the stains now, concealed beneath the curtain of darkness. One more time counting them all. One more night on the Wall before his life changed again.

“Wheels up at dawn,” Steve repeated to himself, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

_At first, the breach is a scientific curiosity, nothing more. The newspapers and news channels devote a day or two to the unexplained phenomenon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, then return to their standard coverage of the latest political mashup and which star is having which director’s love child. Various theories for the breach’s existence are proposed and disproven. Some groups claim it’s a sign of the end times, but no one takes them seriously._

_(“Maybe those nuts were onto something after all,” Bucky will joke, much later, as they climb out of their Jaeger after another successful mission. “Sure seems like the world is ending, sometimes.”)_  

_Steve’s in art club the day the first kaijuu comes out of the breach. It’s an extracurricular – their high school doesn’t have the money to support things like arts and music – but one of the teachers sponsors it and puts up some of her money for supplies. Steve and the handful of other kids who love art fundraise and guilt-trip various charitable organizations into chipping in the rest. Steve’s hoping that if he can put a good enough portfolio together, maybe he can go to art school after he graduates. He even gets the Avondale Home For Orphans to chip in some on his behalf, though he and Bucky were legally emancipated a few years ago on the grounds that they stuck together, stayed in school, and didn’t lose their jobs. But Sister Mary Clarence remembers her two inseparables fondly, and it doesn’t hurt that he and Bucky bring toys around every December for the kids’ holiday baskets._

_On the fatal day the breach turns dangerous, Bucky’s stayed after school with him, like always when he’s not picking up an extra shift at the docks. Bucky’s Steve’s favorite drawing subject, and if sometimes they get a little handsy when Steve’s posing Bucky, well, Ms. Skye has been known to find her trashy romance novel incredibly diverting sometimes, and never mind the school policy on PDAs. But they’re interrupted by Ms. May banging on the door, saying they need to get down to the cafeteria quick, it’s on all the TVs. They don’t even have time to ask her what’s going on before she’s down the hallway banging on the next door. They probably wouldn’t have believed her if she’d tried to tell them. Even once they get down to the cafeteria and can see it for themselves on the screens in living color, it’s pretty hard to believe._

_“ – came through the breach two hours ago,” the announcer’s saying frantically, hair and tie askew, “and made landfall in San Francisco. Local police tried to engage and suffered heavy losses. Now the National Guard – ”_

_The world changes overnight. Suddenly nowhere is safe. Two more kaijuu come through in rapid succession and trash Hong Kong and Milan. They’re eventually stopped, as was the one in San Francisco, but at ruinous cost. It becomes clear to everyone very rapidly that their existing defenses aren’t going to cut it. The World Security Council is formed to try and stave off the impending threat, and the first thing they do is start recruiting._

_Steve and Bucky try to enlist right after Bucky turns eighteen, about nine months after the first kaijuu came through the breach. They go down to the recruiter’s office on Eighth and Broadway full of naive expectations. They’ll both be accepted. They’ll both be posted to the same unit. They’re not foolish enough to think the war will be over by Christmas, but as long as they’re together it won’t matter._

_And in their defense, that was the way things would have worked right at the beginning of the Kaijuu War, when the army was taking everyone who was willing to sign their name, when new units were being formed out of the first five hundred men and women to walk through a door, and when the major population centers like New York were the hotbeds of troop activity._

_But the plan goes sideways right from the start. Bucky’s accepted for enlistment on his first try, but Steve isn’t. The army physician shakes her head and says that new guidelines have just come down, requiring certain standards of physical fitness that Steve doesn’t meet. She can’t accept him._

_“But,” she adds slyly, “The orders are rolling out in waves. So if you were to try another recruiting office…” she takes their summary sheets, Bucky’s with his 1A, Steve’s with his 4F, and holds them over the shredder suggestively._

_Bucky looks at Steve, and Steve looks at Bucky, and they both nod. The doctor shreds both of their files with a wink, and the two of them go off to find another recruiting office that hasn’t yet heard the new orders._

_Two years later, Steve’s still in New York, trying to find someone who will let him into the Army. And Bucky’s off in Europe, because finally Steve said Bucky should enlist regardless, there was no point his staying around here, wasting time when he could be fighting the war._

_“I’ll keep trying,” Steve had said, trying to project confidence, “and it’s not like you’ll be going far. Maybe they’ll even let me stay on base with you some of the time.”_

_“Some of ‘em have got married housing,” Bucky had said almost shyly, biting his lip. “If you… I mean, that way we wouldn’t have to move again once you’ve joined up.”_

_Steve had opened his mouth, and he’d wanted to say yes, wanted it so badly he could taste it. But they were still just two punk kids, barely past their eighteenth birthday – Bucky hadn’t even graduated high school, having dropped out to join up – and even though Steve couldn’t imagine a life without Bucky and knew Bucky felt the same, it seemed presumptuous, like tempting fate, to just go straight for it. “Afterwards,” is what he finally says. “After the war is over, and we have time to enjoy it.” Because, he thinks, if they can make it through the war, they’ll know they can make it through anything. Steve had smiled to take the sting of his refusal away, and added, “You still get conjugal privileges, though.” Bucky’d laughed, and promised not to kill all the kaijuu before Steve got out there._

_Except, by the time Bucky finally does enlist, everything’s changed again. The first Jaegers have started fighting kaijuu to a standstill, and Shatterdomes are being erected in all of the major cities. The need for ordinary men has shifted to Europe, where the fighting is inland. And so before they know it Bucky’s been shipped overseas and they’re reduced to email and the occasional phone call when Bucky draws a time slot on the overstressed transcontinental data system. Steve misses Bucky’s voice more than he knew was possible, almost as much as he misses Bucky himself. He records all their phone calls and plays the tapes back at night when he’s trying to sleep and the bed’s too big for him alone. Steve lays there and listens to Bucky talk and swears to himself he’s going to find someone to let him join up one day. One way or another, he’s going to get out there to where Bucky is. Someone’s gotta watch that jerk’s back, after all._

_Steve’ll get out there any day now._

* * *

_Steve looks around the examining room and sighs._

_It’s a different room every time he tries to enlist, of course it is, but it always looks the same. Eight feet by eight, concrete walls painted industrial beige, exam table against the far wall. The same posters hang around:_ Stop the Kaijuu Threat! Protect Your Loved Ones! Uncle Sam Wants YOU!. _They’re faded now, but Steve remembers when they were new, bright colors and text sounding optimistic instead of pathetically defiant_. _The eye chart is on the back of the door like always; it’s the one test Steve can reliably pass. His sight is fine. It’s just the rest of him that won’t get with the program, and good eyesight, more than one army physician has told him in annoyance, is not enough to make a good soldier._

_Steve hates it when they adopt a scolding tone, like Steve is an unruly child, instead of a grown man trying to help. He resents even more that it only happens now that he’s trying to enlist on his own – now that Bucky’s unit has finally shipped out, after many delays and false starts, to a station in Europe._

_The door opens, and Steve looks up. The man who enters isn’t the doctor who had examined Steve, though he’s wearing the same white coat that says Army Med and carrying a clipboard with the serpents-and-staff emblazoned on the back. “I’m Doctor Erskine,” he says, and his voice is level and kind. “My colleague had to step out, but I have your results here.”_

_He waves the clipboard gently, and even from his position on the table, Steve can see the 4F stamped on it. Again. He swallows his rage and disappointment and wonders, just for a second, if he should give up. Steve’s never been the kind who lays down and says die – if he were, he’d’ve been dead a dozen times over by now, with the way his body keeps trying to quit on him – but sheer stubbornness isn’t enough to pass an army entrance physical no matter how many times he tries it._

_"You're too short," the man - Doc Erskine – begins. He sounds almost apologetic, which is new, but the script isn’t and Steve winces preemptively. He knows what comes next._

_Erskine doesn't disappoint. "You're too skinny. You've got zero muscle mass. Your lung function tests are abysmal, and that’s leaving out the asthma, which means you’re unlikely to put on muscle.”_  
  
Steve sighs. Without looking at the doctor, he stands up from the examining table, fumbling for his hat. Maybe Steve should admit that he’s never going to be accepted into the standing forces, no matter how dire the kaiju threat, and apply instead to one of the civilian works groups. He’s heard the Army Corps of Engineers is planning a series of defensive walls around major U.S. cities. He’d even technically be in the army, if he joined up with them. 

_"Steven Grant Rogers," the Doc reads from his clipboard. He takes his time saying it, like he’s trying out the name. Probably planning the bolo he’s going to compose, warning other army physicians about the stubborn kid who keeps beating on their doors._  
  
Steve turns regardless, one hand on the doorknob. The man’s looking at him – really looking, like he sees Steve, not a ninety-pound weakling who won’t just join the COE like he ought and stop wasting everyone’s time. 

_No one’s looked at him like that since Bucky shipped out._  
  
“I took the liberty of running a few additional tests,” Doc Erskine says. “There’s a new program that’s starting up. They have some very unusual requirements.”

_“Like short, skinny, and sickly?” Steve asks bitterly._

_Erskine hums. “Not exactly.”_

_He holds up the clipboard, walks over to the trash can, and drops it in._

_“What would you say,” he begins, “if I told you that this was a program where your physical body didn’t matter?”_

* * *

_Dropping into a Jaeger is like nothing Steve’s ever felt before. It’s like he’s shed his problems, his disabilities, his entire skin, and been born anew as the man he’d always wanted to be. It’s like the growth spurt Bucky still kept promising him would come along one day. It’s like being born again._

_It’s like freedom. In here, his size truly doesn’t matter._

_That doesn’t stop anyone else in his cohort (third Jaeger candidates group, East Coast division) from commenting on it. And the ones that confine themselves to words are few and far between. Even here, it seemed, when they’re all supposed to be united for the defense of Earth, bullies gang up on the weak._

_Corporal Phillips doesn’t bother with anything so overt as bullying. He simply gazes over Steve’s head, the first day his trial group are lined up for intake inspection, and remarks, apparently to no one, “Well, there’s always some dross in the furnace.”_

_Steve has to bite his tongue. The bullies take it as carte blanche and promptly jump him as soon as the door closes behind Phillips._

_He fights them, of course, but on land he hasn’t changed a bit. It’s in a Jaeger that he’s suddenly stronger, faster, better. He wipes the ground with his entire cohort in virtual combat trials the next day, one by one. Then Steve stands over their downed bodies, breathing hard even though it’s only a sim, and feels ashamed of himself, too. When he pulls his VR helmet off after the day’s trials, he can’t meet Doc Erskine’s eyes. Give him a little bit of power, and Steve isn’t any different than any bully, it seems._

_Doc Erskine disagrees. “You felt badly over it,” he tells Steve later, in the mess. “They wouldn’t have. That’s the difference between you and them.”_

_The trials last for a week. They end with solo trials – or perhaps they_ are  _combat trials, but each person’s opponent is themselves, their own inner demons. The drift capabilities test doesn’t just test if a person can achieve a stable drift given the appropriate circumstances. That test was performed before anyone was even accepted to the candidates’ group. This test checks whether their mind is stable enough that it can be shared without driving their partner mad._

_When Steve struggles back up to the surface and staggers out of the drift tank, pushing wet hair out of his eyes, he sees the rest of his trial group standing around watching. He’s the last to emerge, it seemed, which maybe explains why all of the instructors and drift scientists are standing around, too, waiting for him to finish. But it doesn’t explain why everyone is so quiet._

_His eyes seek out Erskine’s among the crowd. The doc looks like he’s having a hard time fighting back a smile. He jerks his chin, subtly, towards the wall-mounted readout. Steve looks over automatically. Finds the line marked_ Rogers, Steven G.

_“I’ve never seen scores like that before,” Doctor Fitz says, just as Doctor Simmons says, “I didn’t think scores like that were_ possible _.”_

_“I’ll have to call Stark,” Fitz goes on. Simmons says something that sounds like “Redesign the test harness” and “Redo the test with a higher threshold”._

_“Humph,” Phillips says, arms crossed over his chest. Steve hadn’t even known Phillips had come in, he’d been so deep in the drift._

_Around them, the candidates are murmuring among themselves, buzzing like a swarm of mosquitos. Phillips’s gaze sweeps over the crowd. “All right,” he booms out. “All of you, dismissed. Get some sleep. Final decisions in the morning.” Phillips, the scientists, and the trainers will stay up tonight, poring over the data from the trials, and tomorrow everyone in the trial group will hear their fate. Either acceptance into the Jaeger program and assignment to a Shatterdome, or rejection and a transfer back to their original duty station. With the exception of Steve, they’d all been serving military before earning a spot in Jaeger trials._

_The other candidates file out. Steve grabs a towel from the rack and makes to follow, swiping ineffectually at the drift fluid still gunking up his hair._

_“Rogers,” Phillips says. Automatically Steve stops and turns._

_“Sir?”_

_“I expected you to sink,” Phillips says baldly. “Instead you swam – and how. Pack your gear; you’re in. I want you on the morning transport to Allied Shatterdome.” He jerks his head left, to where the scientists still stand in a gaggle studying Steve’s readouts. “Erskine’s base doctor there. You two are thick as thieves anyway.” Erskine coughs guiltily, and Phillips chuckles. “Don’t think I didn’t know it was you who pulled strings to get him into trials. _”__

_“Rightly so,” Erskine points out._

_“Not disagreeing,” Phillips concedes. “But he’s your problem now.” His gaze swings back to Steve. “Good luck, son.” He nods to Steve, something like respect in his gaze, then turns around and heads out, leaving Steve gaping in his wake like a guppy._  
  
"You still need a drift partner," Erskine says into the silence. "When you get to Allied Shatterdome, we'll schedule compatibility tests. Hopefully someone already in the program will be a match. If not, you’ll be put in the reserves until we find a compatible copilot – "  
  
"Don’t worry about that," Steve interrupts, exuberant, still riding the high. "I already know the perfect guy."  


* * *

_Bucky arrives in Allied Shatterdome a week after Steve. He shows up still in his Army uniform, the dust of Austria clinging to his boots, and clicks right back into his place at Steve’s side like he’d never left. His stuff stowed in the locker next to Steve’s, his snores keeping Steve up in the middle of the night, his tray across from Steve’s on the tables in the mess hall. When Bucky clears his trials and the pair of them are commissioned, their Jaeger is one of the first mark threes off of Stark’s production line – the advantage of being based in Allied Shatterdome, closest to his manufactory – and it’s five hundred tons of sheer metal. They christen it_ Howling Commando  _in front of the entire base. Then they sneak back in after reveille to christen it properly, the old-fashioned way._

_The two of them in a Jaeger together are pure magic. They'd always been good, reading each other's moves in a fight, taking their cues, unspoken, from the thousand subtle ways they communicated without words. Like they were already connected mind-to-mind. Drifting is just the next step, the natural evolution of the team of Steve-and-Bucky._

_Base Commander Hill, who’d been skeptical of Steve’s assertion that he had the perfect drift partner all lined up, comes in person to watch_ Howling Commando _’s acceptance trials._

_“I’ve seen it before,” she’d told Steve when he’d first gotten to Allied Shatterdome. “Siblings, lovers, parents and children – they all think they’ll be perfect together. The lucky ones aren’t even drift compatible and get reassigned right away. The unlucky ones are. It’s not pretty, Rogers. However well you think you know this guy, seeing what’s in his head will change you. Change him for you. It ruins you both, every time.”_

_“Phillips didn’t believe in me either,” Steve had said boldly. “I showed him he was wrong, and I’ll show you, too.”_

_After an incredulous moment of silence, Hill had smiled. “All right, kid,” she’d said, signing Bucky’s transfer orders. “I hope you do.”_

_After the trials are over, their drift and their Jaeger pronounced ready (with flying colors), Hill comes over to where Steve and Bucky are climbing out of the drift pool. They’re laughing and crying at the same time, touching each other under the pretense of helping each other unsuit but getting in each other’s way, hugging, kissing, not caring who sees. Hill looks at the two of them glowing, clinging to each other, and nods._

_“All right, gentlemen,” she says. “Now the real fun begins.”_

_Bucky’s mindscape in the drift is pre-war Brooklyn as it had never been. All the rough edges are smoothed over with nostalgia. Everything glows with fond recollections. Memories of them both as children run through it, barefoot, ragged, laughing with the exuberance of youth. That had never been reality. They’d both been orphaned at a young age and thrown into the system. The world had been a harsh, uncaring place, all too ready to grind them up and serve them out as mincemeat. But Bucky’s memories are full of the triumph of having struggled and succeeded, beaten the world, and done it together. Everything is bright in Bucky’s mind, the sun at high noon._

_Under that radiant light the kaijuu are suddenly insignificant, just bullies like they’d fought a thousand times before, and the world is a dusty sandlot where they scrap and wrestle and come out on top, every time._

_They are the best team in Allied Shatterdome._

_Until the first_ Zola _-class kaiju comes through the breach.  
_

* * *

_Steve tries to find another Jaeger, another copilot, after Bucky’s death. He’s driven by fire and blood, desperate to get back out there and get revenge, kill every last kaijuu. He thinks that maybe if he did that, the screaming in his head would stop, and maybe he’ll be able to stop, too._

_But_ Howling Commando  _had been one of the last mark threes still in operation when Bucky had died. The mark fours had been deployed to Shatterdomes worldwide, along with pilots fitted with the brand-new type two Jaeger implant, which supposedly fixes the last of the flaws in the drift system and makes mid-drift death a bad memory. Steve’s problem is that the old type one implants that linked pilots to the first three Jaeger models aren’t forward compatible. Steve can’t pilot the mark four. No one with the type one implant can, and so the surviving type one pilots had continued to take their old model Jaegers until they’d been killed, one by one. Steve tries for drift compatibility with every type one pilot he can find, traveling from Shatterdome to Shatterdome, but with no success._

_It’s not really a surprise, when drift compatibility is so rare. If he spends the rest of his life searching for another copilot among the general population, he might find one. Might. Assuming Steve even is one of the twenty-five percent of drift-capable pilots who are drift-compatible with more than one person. Assuming Steve could convince the WSC to fit that person with a type one implant, when they’re rapidly becoming obsolete. Assuming, by the time this happens, there are still any early model Jaegers left intact for type one pilots to fly. Assuming the kaijuu won’t have wiped them all out by then._

_It’s hopeless. Steve knows it is from the start, knows in his heart that even if he could test himself against everyone on Earth, he’s a one-and-done – compatible with no one else. Three months after Bucky’s death, after travelling halfway around the world and back, he is even able to admit it._

_Commander Phillips tries to convince him to move back to Lehigh Trainingdome. He tells Steve that someone has to teach the next generation of Jaeger pilots, be their mentor and prepare them for the realities of fighting kaijuu. Steve looks around at all those young faces – young like he and Bucky had been once – and shakes his head. He bundles up everything he has left into his rucksack that night, throws it over his shoulder, and leaves without looking back._

_Three bleak and barren months later, he arrives at the Wall, and he’s been here ever since._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has some missing scenes, usually indicated by [+] or a [description].

Walking into SHIELD Shatterdome felt like slipping back into an old, familiar suit of clothes. From the moment Steve’s foot touched the shuttle bay’s grating, when the sights and sounds and smells of a working Shatterdome washed back over him, he felt his shoulders riding straighter, his spine getting stiffer. The man he’d been on the Wall, who worked himself to exhaustion and was stooped under a load of memories and regrets, sloughed away in the instant rush of higher-pressure recycled air into the shuttle as the airlocks opened. 

“You look different already,” Clint said, striding past Steve as he stood on the shuttle’s unloading ramp and breathed deep, eyes closed. “Guess you’re glad you’re doing this after all.” Peggy chuckled.

“Come on,” Fury said. Steve didn’t have to open his eyes to know that Fury, the bastard, was smirking. “I’ll give you greenhorns the dime tour.”

“I know how things are laid out in a Shatterdome,” Steve protested. The idea of making polite noises while being shown various bays around the ‘dome made his nerves grate. Now that he was finally here, he just wanted to get on with this. “Isn’t the shuttle from Red Shatterdome here yet? I need to meet my…” he trailed off, not sure how to finish that sentence. His partner? His copilot? His potential murderer by way of drift psychosis?

Steve was spared having to come up with a noun by Fury’s negative headshake. “Shuttle’s not here yet, and won’t be for a couple of days. They took heavy damage getting out of Red. Moving on impulse drive only.”

“Can’t they change shuttles at the next Shatterdome?” Clint wanted to know. “Or at least make repairs?”

“The WSC is shutting down the Jaeger program,” Peggy said from Fury’s other side. “Who’s to say that if they land anywhere but here, they’ll be allowed to take off again?” 

“Better not to take the risk,” Fury agreed, glancing speculatively at Peggy. “They’re also detouring around the other Shatterdomes just in case. Adds another day or so to the travel time.” He motioned them all forward through the big double doors separating the shuttle bay from the center of the ‘dome. “In the meanwhile, why don’t you come and have a look?”

Peggy and Clint moved forward eagerly and gasped. Steve followed them onto the central area’s overlook and gazed down, gripping the overlook hard. 

Beneath them stretched the main Jaeger bay, the center and tallest part of the structure. Shatterdomes weren’t tall just because someone had felt like building big; that much height was needed to store the Jaegers, which in turn had to be tall enough to go toe-to-toe (sometimes literally) with kaijuu. Which meant when they looked down, they looked _down_ , taller than the height of the Wall had ever been.

“Look at that,” Clint breathed. Peggy had a hand to her mouth, gazing around in wonder.

The bay was circular, and around the edges, at regular intervals, a Jaeger was standing in its slightly recessed bay, hooked up to the Shatterdome’s power and life support systems. They were a motley collection. Nothing like the relatively homogenous rows of well-maintained Jaegers that Steve remembered from Allied Shatterdome. Several of them showed obvious signs of damage. Some weren’t currently battle ready, parts spread across the bay floor, sparks and the flare of blowtorches coming from open maintenance hatches. Directly across from Steve, the unmistakable outline of a lone mark three Jaeger was visible, although it looked like more of a collection of spare parts than a functional Jaeger. _Lucky Devil_. “Jesus,” Steve muttered. “Does she even run?”

“Oh, she runs,” Fury said confidently. “Don’t be fooled by her exterior. She’s not factory-fresh, but she runs.”

“She looks like she was cobbled together from the spare parts of destroyed Jaegers.” 

“That’s because she was.” Fury quirked an eyebrow: "Let's just say the WSC didn't exactly 'authorize' her restoration." 

“Jesus,” Steve said again.

“You said it,” Clint said next to him. He was looking down at the bays next to Steve and shaking his head. “What kind of shop are you running here, Fury? I can see at least two people using a blowtorch where a point welder would be better, and if those rivets are standard I’ll eat my eye protection.”

Fury gave him a grin. “Maybe you better get down there and fix it for me, then. Lift bank’s down the hall thataway.” He gave a negligent wave.

“Yeah?” Clint said speculatively. “Hmm.” He looked down at the bay again, then back at Fury. “I’ll just go have a look,” he said, jerking a finger down and moving, faux-casually, towards the lift bays.

“So much for the dime tour,” Peggy remarked.

Fury chucked. “I’ll make sure he finds the mess and his bunk all right,” he promised. “Doesn’t look like he’ll want much more than that.” 

“Sure he will,” Steve said. “Directions to the supply closet, and the name of your crew chief, so he can strangle them.”

“My crew chief didn’t make the evac shuttle out of Triskelion Shatterdome,” Fury said somberly.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Peggy said, “but you can’t continue to operate like _this_. Why haven’t replaced them yet?”

“Think I just did.”

Peggy opened her mouth, got a speculative twinkle in her eye, then closed it again.

“This way,” Fury said, waving them both towards a different bank of lifts. “Let me show you two the rest.”

“Great,” Steve muttered, following behind the other two and wishing for his bunk.

The tour was idiosyncratic, bypassing areas that Peggy had no need (and Steve no desire) to see. Even so, Steve had to admit it was illuminating, even for him. SHIELD Shatterdome was clearly just getting itself put together, personnel and equipment pouring in from every corner of the Jaeger program more loyal to Fury – or Earth, as the Director preferred to express it – than the WSC. Peggy peppered Fury with questions at every stop, clearly determined to learn everything there was about the Shatterdome as quickly as possible.

With the two of them talking, it was easy for Steve to stay quiet and focus on breathing through the wave of memories each area brought back. They skipped the Drift bay entirely, where Jaeger pilots assembled and suited up, dropped into their Jaegers and went out to meet the kaijuu foe. Steve was quietly grateful when Fury’s hand went right past that button in the transport pod to select Medical. He’d have to go back to the bay, and sooner rather than later, but he was just as glad to not have it be right now, not right away.

Fury was saying something to Peggy about intake physicals. Steve tuned them out.

He could still close his eyes and remember the drift bay in Allied Shatterdome. He could retrace the steps he’d taken a hundred times. Coming through the door at a run, the alarm blaring in his ears. Detouring left to get to the particular drift pool that linked up to _Howling Commando_ ’s cockpit. Getting into his suit with Bucky next to him, checking each other’s connections, holding hands and jumping in. They’d sink down, denser in the odd composition of drift fluid than they ever were in the public pools of their youth. Above them horizontal doors would slide closed, sealing their pool off from the dome into its own unit. Then the entire unit would detach, being moved on giant rails down into _Howling Commando,_ where it would transform. In the drift, control overlays appeared on the bare metal, superimposed by data exchanged through their pilots’ implants. When Steve reached his hand out to adjust a dial, what he touched wasn’t physical. His implant transformed the electrochemical impulses of physical motion into commands that the drift fluid carried to his Jaeger. The state of every switch, every button, and every readout was virtual, kept in the Jaeger’s memory and beamed out to her pilots in real time.

Steve pulled himself out of it when the transport pod stopped at Medical and trailed after the other two, grateful neither had noticed his distraction. Medical was distracting enough on its own. Steve looked around in dismay at the cavernous bay lacking much of anything besides lights and a few computer consoles. “Supplies are coming in from Tokyo,” Fury promised before Steve could even open his mouth. “No live operations before then, I promise.”

“Good,” Steve said fervently, looking around the bare walls – not even a biobed – and trying not to imagine the carnage of battle being tended to by three nurse practitioners wielding band-aids. There wasn’t even a base doctor, for Christ’s sake. Steve hoped like hell one was coming in from Tokyo.

The Science bay was more promising. Far from being empty, it was overfull. Every shelf was crowded; additional tables and cabinets had been set up and then covered with stuff. In the center of it all a lone figure was fiddling with something that looked like a cross between a drift stabilizer and the creature from _Alien_.

“Tony!” Fury called as they stepped out of the pod. “Fresh blood in the ‘dome. Giving them the tour.”

“Yeah, uh, hi. Nice to meet you. Very busy,” the man said distractedly, darting across the lab to grab another doohickey.

“Are you the doctor?” Peggy asked doubtfully.

The man laughed. “Who, me? Nah. Drift specialist. Just needed to grab a few things. Running an experiment. Out of your way in a minute.” 

“Peggy, Steve, meet Tony Stark,” Fury introduced. 

Steve blinked, sure he’d heard incorrectly. “ _The_ Tony Stark?”

The crazy man paused, then looked up and at them for the first time. “Maybe?” he tried, shoving his goggles out of his face. He looked suddenly, surprisingly young, in spite of the facial hair and shadows under his eyes.

“Son of Howard Stark?” Peggy wanted to know.

The other man started to frown. “Well – ”

“As in, Howard Stark, inventor of drift technology?” 

The frown was definitely full blown now. Tony cleared this throat, then turned away, waving a hand dismissively. “Yeah, that’s me, my old man’s son, nothing else to see here. Definitely not the designer of the drift stabilizer, or the type two pilots’ implant, or any of the Jaegers _after_ the mark one – ” 

“The drift stabilizer,” Steve blurted. “You invented the drift stabilizer!”

Tony glanced at him, expression unfreezing slightly. His eyes skipped to the small plate of metal just visible on Steve’s left temple, beneath his newly trimmed hair. “You a type one pilot?” he asked, apparently able to spot the difference between the type one and type two implants, externally, by eye, at ten meters. “Didn’t know we had any of those left.”

“Those drift stabilizers were amazing,” Steve said earnestly. “I got into the program right as the mark threes were coming out. Qualified on the mark two before my mark three arrived at the ‘dome. The difference was amazing.”

“You could feel it?” Tony demanded. “You could actually feel the difference? No one else – ”

“Gentlemen,” Fury said mildly. Tony screeched to a verbal halt. “Feel free to catch up on this later, but these two just arrived and I haven’t even shown them their billets yet.”

  
“Right, right,” Tony said. He glanced at Steve. “But stop by later, please? I didn’t know any of the mark three’s pilots were still in the service. I’d love to run some brainscans. I’m trying to put together this new drift-compatibility test and – ”

“Sure,” Steve interrupted, having realized from Fury’s example that it was just about the only way to get a word in edgewise. “I will.” Actually, he realized, this would be the perfect opportunity to ask someone about his recurring episodes… Doc Foster had been so sure it wasn’t psychosis, but then again, she’d been sure the episodes would go away eventually, and they hadn’t. Steve trusted Doc Foster, sure, but drift technology wasn’t exactly well understood, and who better to get a second opinion from than the preeminent drift scientist on the planet?

“Thanks.” Tony grinned. “I promise it won’t hurt,” he added, seemingly as an afterthought. Steve was left wondering what previous experiments had made that little disclaimer necessary.

After that the dime tour wended through Ops, where they were introduced to the head of Jaeger operations. Phil Coulson was another former pilot, from the second wave. He moved with a limp, but that wouldn’t matter in the drift, and his receding hairline showed that his implant was still present and viable. Steve wondered, a little frustrated, why Fury had made such a point of needing Steve in particular when he seemed to have a collection of ex-Jaeger pilots from the first two waves already on hand.

“Drift psychosis,” Fury said to Steve afterwards in the transport pod, without prompting. They’d lost Peggy to a wall of screens showing current and historical kaijuu activity around the globe, leaving her grilling Coulson about how Jaeger ops worked with the tenacity of a seasoned interrogator. “Stark cooked up some new drug that lets him stay stable on the ground, but he can’t drop.”

Steve winced and nodded, regretting that he’d let his curiosity show so plainly, and hoping that Coulson hadn’t been offended. 

After that, the tour wrapped up with a visit to the pilot’s dormitories. Steve’s was apparently a single, which surprised him, and though it couldn’t have been more than ten by ten, it felt huge with just the one of him.

And _wrong_. Once matched, pilot teams spent as little time apart as possible. That was one of the pieces of official corps dogma that its members followed religiously. The better the real-world rapport between the pilots, the better their synchronization in drift. The better their drift sync, the more seamlessly they worked together, moved their Jaeger, fought the kaijuu. The real world results were clear and immediate. Pilots who stayed apart died. Pilots who behaved like conjoined twins lived – and saved lives.

Steve spin slowly in the center of the room, and out of the corner of his eye, he could see Fury watching him. Waiting for a reaction? 

“I thought pilots bunking together was standard,” Steve tried casually, dropping his duffel at the foot of the bunk.

Fury hummed noncommittally. “We’ve got enough space that no one has to share that doesn’t want to.”

“That’s not the point, though. Pilots are supposed to have rapport.”

“I don’t know how much rapport you and the Winter Soldier are going to be able to stand. This is the man that literally drives his co-pilots crazy, and no one can tell me why. Until they can, I don’t want the two of you sharing a lot of off-duty space, you get me?”

Steve frowned. “But – ” 

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” Fury cut him off. “But given the billions of people who are depending on us, it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.” Fury nodded. “I’ll just leave you to settle in.” And that, apparently, was that. 

Steve let the door close behind Fury, then hauled his duffle bag onto the bed and opened it up. It was the work of only a few minutes to stow his few possessions – change of off-duty clothes, something to sleep in, a photocube, and Bucky’s old dogtags, the ones from his time in the regulars. Steve’s new pilot’s suit was already hanging in the locker. Steve brushed his fingers over it, remembering the feel of the specially designed material against his skin, the press of the drift fluid against it as the cockpit filled. Then he closed the locker door and pressed his forehead against it, breathing hard.

It was too much. A Shatterdome, a pilot’s suit, a Jaeger down in the bay that was supposedly his – and Steve was suddenly back in Allied, fighting to surface around the sucking wound of his broken drift. It had taken him months after Bucky’s death to learn how to suppress the constant feeling of someone being missing. To stop turning around and expecting to see Bucky, to stop asking Bucky what he thought of something. Even, finally, to stop rolling over in the middle of the night and reaching for Bucky. _Broken drift,_ Doc Foster had said. _It’s normal. It will pass._ It hadn’t, exactly; but he’d learned to live with it.

But now he was standing in a Shatterdome again, smelling engine grease and oil, feeling the ever-present rattle of the generators under his feet, blinking against the harsh lighting overhead. Standing in a pilot’s billet that was meant for two, but now there was only one bunk, one chest, one suit hanging in the one locker –

Steve found himself in the hallway without any conscious memory of having gotten there, leaning against the wall and wiping his forehead with a hand that trembled faintly. 

He let himself shake for a minute, leaning against the rough-hewn stone of the ‘dome wall, tipping his head back to stare unblinkingly at the strips of fluorescents lighting the hall. If anyone passed by, Steve didn’t notice, and they had the decency to keep to themselves.

_This is your chance,_ Steve told himself. _You wanted to find another pilot you could drift with. You wanted to finish what you and Bucky started and make the world safe again. So, now you can. You don’t get to fall apart now._

Steve pushed off the wall, squared his shoulders, and went hunting for Tony. Maybe the other man wouldn’t expect to see him back so quickly, but Tony had offered, and Steve needed to _do_ something. Needed to get this worked out so he could function. 

_Later_ , he promised himself fiercely. _When the war is over. Then you can fall apart._

* * *

“Say ‘aaah’,” Tony said. 

“Aaah,” Steve said.

“Looks good.” Tony removed the tongue depressor, dropping it into a small biohazard container next to the table where Steve was perched, shirtless and hooked up to a dozen monitors, awaiting the drift specialist’s verdict. “Your vitals all check out, and you’ve put on muscle mass since your last corps physical. How’d you do that? Were you getting steroids on the Wall? Any lung problems?”

“No,” Steve answered, hopping down and making to pull his shirt back on. “Just a lot of manual labor. And working out. I guess there wasn’t any need for a maintenance dose after all – ”

“Even with all the labor?” Tony whistled. “Nice. I thought you must have still been getting the boosters, with the way your lung function tests came back. That’s amazing.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed. He took a deep breath, bracing himself. “And… the flashes I asked you about?”

“You are exactly as crazy you were on the first day you decided to drop into a tank of breathable liquid hooked into a giant exoskeleton in order to do battle with alien monsters from beyond space and time,” Tony assured him.

Steve had to laugh. “Thanks.” He paused. “I think.”

“Seriously. I can tell the flashes are worrying you, but trust me, you’ve got no other signs of psychosis.”

“Then what’s causing them?” Steve demanded, frustrated.

“Now that, my new friend, is an excellent question.” Tony frowned, spinning a monitor around to face Steve. “See these?” He pointed out one of the many sine waves being traced across the screen. It bounced erratically, darting across the screen one minute, then scrolling languidly forward the next.

“Yes?”

“Those are your gamma waves. To make a long story short, they’re what make you drift capable – when you achieve drift, you communicate over gamma waves. Basically, the low-level radiation that is all around us? You use your brain to modulate the waves for data transmission.”

“Like the internet.”

“Same principle. It’s no good in open air; there’s not enough radiation, so your signal-to-noise ratio is shit, the Shannon limit is basically zero. That’s why we dunk pilots in drift fluid. Much better Nyquist rate… I’ve totally lost you, haven’t I?”

“Sorry,” Steve said sheepishly.

“Anyway. You use these gamma waves to communicate, right? Drift capability is a measure of how well you can do that. If you can modulate them well enough to transmit data, you can drift, period. But a Jaeger takes two to pilot. That means you have to co-drift. That’s harder. You and your copilot have to basically use the exact same frequency modulation scheme in order to be able to do that. It’s like… when you’re drifting, your brain is speaking its own language. A language as unique as your genetic code. And our challenge is to find someone else who speaks the exact same language as you do. That’s drift compatibility.”

Steve blinked. “All of a sudden I’m not so surprised we have so few pilot teams. I’m more surprised we have any.”

“Yeah,” Tony sighed. “And I think that may be why blood relations have such better drift compatibility percentages… right now, the only way you can drift is to use your native language, okay? However you instinctively modulate the gamma waves, that’s it. If no one else does it exactly the same way you do, no compatible copilots. With me so far?”

“Mostly.”

“The frustrating thing is, it _should_ be possible to normalize your outputs. Something in the implant, that takes your instinctive modulation and translates it into a universal standard – “

“You’ve lost me again.” 

“It should be possible to build a universal translator into the pilots’ implant so that you all speak the same language.”

“Universal drift compatibility,” Steve said.

  
“Yeah.” Tony looked suddenly grim. “But it’s dangerous. The drift flaw in the mark fives – ”

Steve swallowed. “Was that you trying it?” he asked quietly, not sure he wanted the answer.

“Not exactly. You have to understand,” Tony said beseechingly. “The drift flaw – it’s all tied into this problem. Sometimes two people are close _enough_ to the same frequency modulation that they can achieve drift together, close enough that it _looks_ stable, but when the drift gets stressed, they start drifting apart. The data gets corrupted. You try to tell your copilot to take the shot, but their brain’s sample rate is subtly different from yours, and what they hear instead – “

“What? What is it?”

Tony wouldn’t meet his eyes. “In order to control a Jaeger, the implant tricks your brain into thinking its electrical system is actually your nervous system. So you tell yourself to move your left arm, but the Jaeger’s left arm is the one that moves. If you accidentally send the wrong command, if you set up a feedback loop… It’s entirely possible to order your heart to stop beating. Or your copilot’s heart.”

“Jesus Christ,” Steve whispered.

“I’m so sorry,” Tony said finally.

“No,” Steve said. He swallowed. “No, don’t be. I may not have known the details, but I knew piloting was risky.” 

“My father didn’t know,” Tony said suddenly. “When he started the research. He had no idea it could be used to do this.”

“Oh my god,” Steve said suddenly, horrified. “The drift flaw that killed them – “

“Yeah.” Tony shrugged, looking away. “I don’t know which of them did it – maybe they did it to each other – but one of them probably killed the other, then themselves.”

“Not on purpose,” Steve said firmly. “Trust me on this, Tony. I didn’t know your parents, but I know what it’s like to drift, and there’s no way they did it consciously.”

“Yeah.” Tony attempted a smile. “That’s what I tell myself.”

“So what were you going to tell me?” Steve prompted, trying for a distraction. He waved at the readout on the monitor, where Steve’s gamma waves bounced merrily along. “Is something weird about my measurements?”

“What? No – well, not exactly – er. Yes, something is weird, but not in the way that indicates drift psychosis.” Tony spun around, apparently forgetting his previous mod entirely. Steve wasn’t so sure, but he’d been the one to attempt the distraction technique, so he couldn’t exactly call Tony on it. 

“What kind of weird, then?” he said instead.

“Well, if you had psychosis, your levels would just be pegged higher. Psychosis is basically a permanent state of semi-drift. At low levels it’s essentially harmless. At high levels…”

“You lose the ability to tell reality from drift,” Steve said. “You’re always drifting.”

“More or less,” Tony confirmed. “But yours are bouncing. Most of the time you’re low – that’s non-drift. But every now and then they spike, like you’re about to drift. Here –  ” he pointed to the display. “And here.” He studied it pensively. “When you start to drift your levels spike, just like this. When a compatible pilot joins you, you would both settle down into a stable state.” Tony traced another line on the display, a little way above the resting line. “These readouts say you keep trying to achieve drift, but when you don’t find a compatible copilot, the drift fails and your brain settles back down.”

“And that causes my flashes?” Steve asked. 

“Not by itself. Have you had any flashes since you walked into this room? You said they were pretty rare, right?”

“They’ve been getting a little more frequent lately,” Steve admitted. “Since Fury showed up.”

“But not more than, like, once a day, right?”

“No.”

“Steve, in the time you and I have been talking, you’ve tried to achieve drift six times.” 

“ _Six_?”

“It’s harmless,” Tony hastened to reassure him. “Really. When you don’t find a partner, you go right back to baseline. My theory for your episodes is that maybe sometimes, you don’t go back immediately. Without having you hooked up to monitoring during an episode, I can’t say for sure, but my guess is that the episodes happen when your gamma waves stay high for a prolonged period of time. You start fading out, expecting drift to start. When you calm down and recognize that you’re not actually entering drift, you go back to normal.”

“So it’ll keep happening?”

“Probably,” Tony admitted. “But you already know how to deal with them. If I’m right, that should be all you need. Remind yourself you’re not drifting, take deep breaths, center yourself in your surroundings. Has an episode ever lasted more than a few minutes?”

“Not yet.” 

“If one ever does, I’ll take another look. But for the moment, my expert opinion – and there’s no one on the planet who knows more about this than I do, so take that for what it’s worth – is that the flashes are essentially harmless.”

“Okay.” Steve took a couple of deep breaths. “I’ll try to be reassured by that.”

Tony laughed. “Yeah.” He started unhooking Steve. “Hey, listen… I know I just met you, but can I ask you a favor?”

“I asked you one,” Steve pointed out. “Just now, remember? I asked you to take a look and see if I was crazy?”  
  
“That’s my job,” Tony said dismissively, but he smiled a little, and the way he did it told Steve that he was touched regardless. “But seriously…”

“Ask away,” Steve said. 

“Remember I told you what I was working on? With the universal drift compatibility?” Steve nodded. “Well, I, uh… look. The Winter Soldier.”

“Oh!” Steve blinked in sudden understanding. “Right! He’s supposed to be able to drift with anyone, right?” 

“Yeah.” Tony shook his head. “I’ve been trying to get a chance to run tests with him for ages, but with the increased kaijuu activity and then the flaw in the mark fives, I was never able… but he’s going to be your copilot, right? Could you ask him? Just for a few tests? He might hold the key to solving this, and if he does…”

“It could win the war for us,” Steve said, thinking of the legend. And of something else. _Drifting with the Soldier causes psychosis. He must be subtly out of tune with everyone else. But if Tony can fix that…_

“Yeah,” Tony said.

“I’ll ask,” Steve promised.

“Thank you,” Tony said. He grabbed the monitoring equipment and started rolling it up, turning away from Steve. He paused in the act of stowing the cables, and said, still facing the monitor, “I’d kind of like to do it for my parents… you know, avenge their deaths, and all that.” 

“It was an accident,” Steve said gently.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know that, but still.” 

“I’ll ask.”

“Thanks,” Tony said. He shook his head, then started rolling the cart away. “I’ll just, uh, put this away. Night, Steve.”

Steve quashed his automatic offer of help. “Night, Tony,” he said instead, recognizing a desire to be alone when he saw it. He hopped down off the table and turned for the elevators.

* * *

The next day found Steve in Fury’s office, skimming what little documentation SHIELD had on the escapees from Red Shatterdome. “This is really everything?” he said in frustration, tapping through a ‘file’ on the Winter Soldier that was little more than a list of missions, copilots, and injuries. It didn’t even have a picture, for Christ’s sake. The entire thing was barely a megabyte. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Jaeger program doesn’t keep our own set of personnel files,” Fury said mildly. “When they set us up, the WSC figured it would be better to let each nation’s government keep records about their own military forces, even if someone was ‘on loan’ to the Jaeger program. Some nations set up their separate databases; some didn’t. And even the ones that did aren’t talking to me right now.”

“Surely you kept _some_ records.”

“Surely we did. Mission records, injury records, drift records. You’re holding them.” 

“Hell of a way to run a unit.” Steve shook his head in amazement. “Is his name _really_ Ivan Ivanovich? It sounds like something out of a propaganda film.”

“Hell, I don’t know. You can ask him when you meet him.”

Steve tabbed out of the useless Winter Soldier file and tapped up the next one. _Natalia Romanova_ , he read. Jaeger pilot, type one implant – “Type one?” he said out loud, skimming down to Romanova’s drift records. “Then why did you need to drag me off of the Wall, when this says Romanova and the Winter Soldier are drift compatible?” Steve frowned, paging down through a list of successful missions the two Russian pilots had completed together. “Am I just insurance?”

“No.” Fury shook his head, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers. “Romanova’s the insurance, if it comes to that. She was the first pilot to show signs of psychosis after drifting with the Winter Soldier. She’s mostly holding it together, I’m told, but if she climbs into a Jaeger with him again she’s not coming back out of it.” 

“So it’s all me,” Steve said. “No other type one pilots in the ‘dome. Just the Winter Soldier and I.”

“You said you were up for it,” Fury said. “You changing your mind?”

“No.”

“Good.” Fury smiled. “Then get to it, pilot. The shuttle’s arriving at 1800 tonight.”

* * *

 

[Peggy and Clint settling in interlude, expand roster of secondary characters]

* * *

Steve walked into the arrival bay, welcoming smile fixed firmly in place, and stopped dead. 

Clint, who had insisted on coming along ‘for moral support’, failed to get the memo and plowed straight into Steve’s back. “What the hell, man?” he groused, shoving at Steve’s shoulder in a futile effort to get him to move. Steve didn’t budge. He _couldn’t;_ he wanted to, but his legs wouldn’t seem to move.

In fact, nothing seemed to be moving right. Steve had automatically started looking for the Winter Soldier as he entered, scanning the small group of people clustered at the foot of the evac shuttle’s loading ramp for someone male, middling tall, with long dark hair and a prosthetic arm, just like the description Fury had been able to piece together. He’d been easy enough to pick out, standing there in a Jaeger pilot’s suit and gesturing as he spoke to Fury. But. But he wasn’t the Winter Soldier, he was –

Steve couldn’t breathe.

“Steve?” Clint’s voice rose into genuine concern, and several of the other people in the bay turned to look at him. Steve had no idea what they saw, but several of them looked startled, and Peggy detached herself from Fury’s side to come over to them at a jog.

“Steve,” she tried, reaching out to touch his shoulder. Standing in front of him. And that wasn’t okay, because that was blocking his view of –

He reached out blindly and moved Peggy aside – gently, because she was trying to help – walked straight across the drift bay and stood in front of a ghost.

“Bucky?” Steve asked, and his voice cracked.

The man – the Winter Soldier – _Bucky_ looked back at him without the slightest glimmer of recognition. “Who the hell is Bucky?” he asked blankly.

Then, before Steve could even begin to react to that horrible unrecognition, something changed behind the Winter Soldier’s eyes. He went from blankness to excitement so fast Steve’s heart, plummeting rapidly, executed a midair course correction that would have done a Jaeger pilot proud and started rocketing towards his throat.

“Am _I_ Bucky?” he demanded, grabbing Steve by the shoulder. “Do you know me?”

“I –“ Steve stammered. “Of course I – what do you mean, are you Bucky – of course you’re Bucky!” He stopped, breathing hard, as doubt started to creep in. He knew Bucky’s face better than his own, so of course this was Bucky. Except. Could he trust himself? He hadn’t felt any of the usual physical signs of one of his episodes – his vision hadn’t gone grey, and his stomach seemed to be in one place. But would he know if he’d finally tipped over the line into psychosis? Tony’s reassurances to the contrary – what if this was it, Steve was finally going crazy? 

Hesitantly Steve asked, “ _Aren’t_ you Bucky?”

“I don’t know,” the other man said ruefully. His free hand – the mechanical one – came up and brushed hair out of his eyes in a heartbreakingly familiar gesture. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me.”

Steve stared at him in blank astonishment.

“Amnesia,” the Winter Soldier elaborated, shrugging his free shoulder. “I don’t remember anything from before two years ago. Well, three, I guess. I spent one of those years in a coma, though.”

“Three years ago,” Steve said numbly. He had to stop and clear his throat. “Three years ago a kaijuu killed my… killed Bucky. Tore our Jaeger apart. We never found…” his eyes went suddenly to Bucky’s mechanical arm, his mechanical _left_ arm – “Oh _God_ ,” he said, suddenly feeling like he was going to be sick. There was the nausea. But somehow he didn’t think he was going crazy anymore.

“Some fishermen found me off the coast of Irktusk,” Bucky said, watching Steve. “Brought me to Red Shatterdome, ‘cause I was wearing a pilot’s uniform, and it was closest. I was pretty beat up. Coma for a year, like I said, and when I woke up, I didn’t remember a thing about who I was or where I’d come from.”

“And they couldn’t look you up?” Steve demanded, outraged. Then he thought of Fury’s incomplete files and knew, with a dropping feeling in the pit of his stomach, that looking wouldn’t’ve done any good.

Bucky was giving another shrug. “Sent out a bolo with my picture, once the swelling had gone down enough that I was recognizable again. No one answered. We figured everyone in the corps who might’ve known me was dead. Three Shatterdomes had been wiped out, between the time they picked me up and the time they sent the bolo.” Bucky sighed. “I was gonna go looking, after the war was over.”

“We were Allied Shatterdome.” Steve swallowed. “Kaijuu got it about two months after you were killed.”

“Sorry,” Bucky said after a moment.

_That’s it?_ Steve wanted to ask. _I just told you that everyone we knew in the program, worked with, trained with, laughed with, is dead. Aren’t you going to ask me about Dugan? Falsworth? Morita? Hill?_

But it was clear that Bucky felt no specific attachment to or sorrow for Allied Shatterdome or any of the people they’d known who’d gone down with it. He couldn’t remember any of it, he’d said. He was just apologizing because that was the thing to do.

“God, Bucky,” he said again.

“Rogers,” Fury’s voice broke in on their moment. Steve jumped; he’d honestly forgotten anyone else existed, let alone that he was standing in the middle of a moderately crowded drift bay. “Are you saying that you can identify this man?” He gestured to the Winter Soldier. 

Steve nodded before his brain caught up. Then he said, “If I’m not going crazy.”

Surprisingly, that drew a laugh out of the petite redheaded woman standing near the shuttle entrance. She was wearing the stained and tattered remains of a pilot’s suit, which made her Natalia Romanova, the other pilot to have escaped Red Shatterdome. “You probably are going crazy,” she said with amusement, “but that doesn’t mean he’s not who you think he is. Going crazy is a common side effect of drifting with that one.” She jerked her chin towards Bucky, though her voice was fond.

“Thanks,” Bucky said dryly.

“You’re not going crazy,” Tony said firmly. Steve jumped; he hadn’t even realized Tony was in the bay. “Steve, seriously. You were fine last night. Remember? Tests all checked out? You haven’t lost it in the last twenty-four hours.”

Peggy was tapping furiously at her tablet. “Steve, what was the name of your orphanage again? In New York City, right?”

“Avondale,” Steve said automatically. Then he blinked. Was there an echo in here?

“I knew the answer to that!” Bucky said in excitement. Steve realized that there hadn’t been an echo – that had been Bucky, saying the exact same thing at the exact same time, like they’d done as kids. Bucky spun around, catching Natalia’s gaze. “Did you hear, Natchka? I knew that!”

She smiled at him. “Good,” she said.

Peggy tapped another combination, and the screen above the landing bay switched from the standard stoplight readouts showing the shuttle’s status to a mirror of her tablet. She’d found the old Avondale website, complete with photos of adorable orphans ready to be adopted, and there in the center of the screen was Bucky. A younger Bucky, gangly and gap-toothed and maybe fourteen years old, but still recognizably Bucky.

Fury looked at the screen. Looked at Bucky. Looked at the screen. Looked at Bucky. “I’d call that a presumptive positive,” he said. “All right. Barnes, or Ivanovich, or whatever we’re calling you today, I need you to answer some questions. Carter, can you conduct Ivanovich – ”

“Barnes,” Bucky said. “I’m not really – we just needed _something_ to call me – ” 

“One thing at a time, son,” Fury said gently. “Carter, take him to Coulson, get a debrief going. I want to know everything you remember, no matter how insignificant, clear?”

“Is that really important right now, sir?” Bucky asked, looking back to Steve. “Can’t we just – “

“Rogers, you’ll need to go swear out an affidavit. Then someone can get started on the paperwork.”

“Sir,” Steve began.

“With all due respect,” Bucky said at the same time, “I’ve had no idea who I am for the last two years. Can’t the paperwork wait?”

Fury pinned him with one of his gazes. “Son, one day the war is going to be over, and when it is, I imagine you’d like to go back to wherever it is you’re from. At the moment you’ve got no claim to America; your presumptive citizenship is Russian, because that’s where you were found. You don’t have a military rank, you’re not entitled to back pay or benefits, and you’ve got no education or employment records. What do you think you’re going to do?”

Bucky stared at him in dismay. 

“You can wait a little longer, Vanya,” Romanova said gently from Bucky’s side. “Come on. We’ll go together, okay? And we’ll meet up with Captain Rogers later.”

“Steve,” Bucky said. “He’ll want you to call him Steve.” 

Steve nodded automatically. Then he realized that no one here had told Bucky his first name. Bucky could maybe have found about it another way – Fury could have beamed Steve’s records over the shuttle – but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe Bucky had remembered it all on his own.

Steve wasn’t crazy. Bucky was alive. _Alive._ He felt like he could do anything. 

“Steve?” Bucky was saying, looking over at him. “Come on, they can wait, right?”

He opened his mouth to back Bucky up, then caught Peggy’s eye. She was giving him a complicated look. He couldn’t read all of it, but the part he could decipher said _think it through, Steve._

So he tried to. Bucky was right – paperwork really wasn’t that urgent. And Fury would know that. So what did that mean? Paperwork must be an excuse. But for what?

Steve remembered Tony’s presence in the bay. Tony was a drift specialist – he was probably qualified to fly a shuttle, but he wasn’t needed to help dock one or help with refueling or repairs. Other people could do those things, people who didn’t have valuable research to conduct in advancements in drift science. At a normal Shatterdome, there would be a team of drift scientists, but Shield had only one, unless more had come on the shuttle. Tony was probably worth three of any normal drift scientist, but he still had a lot on his plate. His time would be incredibly valuable. Why was he here?

He remembered Tony asking him, hesitantly, if Steve would ask the Winter Soldier to agree to drift tests. He remembered Fury’s files, not just on Ivanovich – Bucky – but on Romanova, as well. He remembered Fury saying _if she climbs into a Jaeger with him again she’s not coming back out of it._  

They wanted to run tests. Make sure everything was okay. Steve could understand that. Respect that, even. He hardly wanted to get Bucky back and then lose him again to full-blown drift psychosis. But pilots were notoriously stubborn about medical and intake physicals and routine drift analysis. Bucky, of course, was no different. 

So Steve mustered up a smile and a nod. “Another glorious day in the corps,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. From Bucky’s involuntary smile, it was ringing at least a dim bell. “We’ve got time, right, buddy?”

From behind Bucky, Romanova raised a surprised eyebrow. Peggy gave Steve a look of approval.

“I guess so,” Bucky said after a moment, looking unaccountably betrayed. Steve swallowed uncomfortably.

“Come along, Sergeant Barnes,” Peggy intervened, taking Bucky’s arm. He jumped a little, clearly startled.

“Sergeant?” he could be heard demanding as Peggy towed him out of the room. “Wait, really? I’m _noncommissioned_?” 

A sudden ripple of laughter ran around the room, breaking the tension. The disparity in pilots’ ranks was an old sticking point. No one who lived and worked in a Shatterdome could be ignorant of the matter, and it was the favorite subject for gripes and jokes when other material ran dry. The problem was that becoming a member of the pilots’ corps was treated as an intermilitary loan. While a pilot was with the corps, they weren’t advancing through the ranks with their home force. The corps itself was an arm of the WSC, which meant they were considered irregulars and couldn’t issue commissions or promotions. Some organizations dealt with that better than others; the US Army was notoriously bad at it, and Bucky was still stuck at the rank he’d held three years ago.

Bucky had bitched many a night about the unfairness of it all. Especially immoral, to Bucky’s way of thinking, was that Steve was a captain. Coming in to the corps from civilian life, without any military rank at all, Phillips had been free to register Steve with whatever service branch he pleased. And the SSR was _very_ generous when it came to rank and promotion for Jaeger pilots. 

“Well.” Clint bumped Steve’s shoulder with his, bringing Steve back to the here and now. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but that wasn’t it.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “…yeah.” 

Bucky was alive. It wasn’t a dream, or an hallucination brought on by drift psychosis. Steve wasn’t crazy. Bucky was here. Bucky may have been missing an arm and most of his life, but he knew the name of the orphanage where they’d grown up, and he knew that Steve would want Romanova to call him by his first name, and he knew he wanted to be next to Steve. The rest would come. They’d get the rest back together.

Steve could be _whole_ again.

Around them, the other refugees from Red Shatterdome were breaking off into smaller groups, syncing up with intake personnel from Shield and going off their separate ways. Steve saw Tony dragging off some poor guy in scientists’ whites, taking a mile a minute and waving one arm enthusiastically. The other arm was doing the dragging, but surprisingly, the Red scientist seemed more bemused than angry. Romanova was going off with another group, presumably to have her own intake debrief. The remaining handful of people were all wearing various operations and maintenance gear. They were making a beeline for Clint, who, Steve suddenly realized, now wore the crew chief’s patch on his cap and left arm. _Fury moves fast._

Clint saw them coming and sighed. “Well, we can really use the help. Steve, are you going to be okay? I’ve got to get this bunch down to the bay, but I can come look up you later…”

“I’ll be fine,” Steve promised. He’d’ve been hard pressed to explain how he felt right now, but he was sure that, eventually, he’d be fine. “Anyway, I have to go make that affidavit, right?” In fact, Sitwell was hovering behind the group of techs bearing down on Clint, clearly waiting for Steve to detach himself from so that Sitwell could pounce and drag him out. 

“Yeah.” Clint clapped Steve on the shoulder. “Later, then.” He took a few steps forward and intercepted the group, gathering them all up with a wave of his hand and making tracks for the Jaeger bay.

Steve watched them go for a moment. Still a respectful distance away, Sitwell cleared his throat pointedly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve sighed, wishing for Bucky. Sometimes responsibility sucked. “Let’s do this thing.”

* * *

Late at night, a Shatterdome changed in subtle ways. Fighting the war was theoretically a 24/7 operation, and Lord knew the kaijuu didn’t check with anyone’s social calendar before deciding to come through the breach. But unless an active operation was underway, everything slowed down at night just the same. The overhead lights didn’t have a lower setting, but more of them were turned off, and there were fewer people carrying handlamps or wearing helmet-mounted lights. Drift specialists and doctors went to bed and left Science and Medical empty. The drift bays were dark; there weren’t enough pilots on-base for anyone to draw the graveyard shift on the drift simulators.

There was still work going on in the Jaeger bay, though. Fury’s motley collection of Jaegers probably required more maintenance than the homogenous loadout at Allied had, and even at Allied the main bay had never really taken notice of the time of day. The sights and sounds of the bay were the same, night and day. They formed a soothing cacophony as Steve looked down on them. Sitting on the overlook, letting his feet dangle down into space, leaning against the railing with his chin on his hands, Steve could finally start to try to process the day’s incredible revelations. 

Back at Allied, Steve would come to the overlook at night a lot, in between missions when he couldn’t sleep. Sometimes to think, sometimes to dream about what they’d do when the war was over and he can Bucky could go home. Sometimes he just did it to be close to _Howling Commando_. It was silly, but he wasn’t the only pilot to feel the pull, the need to stay near his Jaeger. Bucky didn’t quite have the same urge Steve did, but he’d come along all the same, when it was late at night and Steve was restless. He’d play it off like it wasn’t any kind of deal – “Can’t sleep anyway, without you tossing and turning and hogging all the covers,” he’d grumble – but Steve had known Bucky was doing it for Steve’s sake, and been grateful. 

Well, it was late at night, and Steve couldn’t sleep. But Bucky wasn’t there to complain about it. Bucky was bunking separately, clear at the other end of the dormitory block, the way Fury had set up when he was just _the Winter Soldier_ and not Steve’s other half suddenly come back to life. The whole end block was housing Red Shatterdome refugees. And that apparently still included Bucky.

Steve hadn’t given sleeping arrangements a thought during the whirlwind day that had followed his announcement of Bucky’s identity in the shuttlebay. What had started as a sworn statement had somehow spun into an endless round of questions and debriefs that he really should have seen coming but had somehow failed to expect. He’d been yawning his head off as he opened the door to his quarters. All he’d wanted was to sleep, wrapped up in Bucky, pretending the last three years had never happened.

This plan had been derailed by the realization that Bucky wasn’t waiting for him inside. Assuming that he just needed to go rescue Bucky from the same endless gamut of questions without answers that Steve had escaped from, he’d turned around to head back out, only to run right into Fury.

“Going somewhere, Captain?” 

“You still have Bucky tied up answering questions?” he’d grumped at Fury.

“Let him go a while ago,” Fury had said mildly. “He was dead on his feet anyway. Sent him off to his bunk for some shut-eye.”

Steve had blinked and turned to look back in his bunk, as if he’d somehow missed Bucky sprawled and snoring on the bed. The room had, of course, still been empty. Steve had turned back to Fury expectantly, too wrung out himself to process the apparent discrepancy between words and actions, waiting for an explanation. 

Fury had sighed. “In _his_ quarters, Rogers.”

Steve processed this. Then, of course, understanding dawned. This room wasn’t set up for two pilots, after all. He and Bucky must have been moved to different quarters. “Let me just grab my gear,” he said, turning back a third time.

Fury’s hand on his shoulder stopped him. “You two are still staying apart,” he said, oddly gentle. “Rogers – Steve. You can’t just pick back up where you left off three years ago.”

Steve had stood there dumbly, trying to get his brain back online to understand what Fury was saying. It didn’t make any sense. Steve was here, and Bucky was here, so of course they were going to be together.

“He doesn’t remember you,” Fury said patiently. “He wants to, that much is obvious. If you walked into his bunk of course he’d let you in. Hell, he’d probably roll over and hand you the lube. He’ll do anything you tell him if you tell him that’s what he used to do. But that’s not necessarily what’s best for him.”

“What’s best for him is,” Steve started, then stopped. The end of that sentence was _to be with me._ Bucky belonged with him and he with Bucky; that was the truth. The beginning and end of how they’d lived their entire lives. 

But.

What was best for _Bucky_ was to be with Steve. He’d never doubted that in his life and he wasn’t about to start now. But the man who had escaped from Red Shatterdome, the Winter Soldier, the legend that had inspired an entire planet… that man wasn’t Bucky. Not _just_ Bucky. That man was someone Bucky had built out of the blank slate of his old life. Did Steve even fit with him? Was there room for Steve in the man Bucky had become?

“What’s best for him is distance and time,” Fury said. “Time to remember. And a little distance to do it in.”

Something twisted deep in Steve’s stomach. The man Bucky had become was a hero. The man _Steve_ had become had had to be begged and cajoled into coming back and doing his duty. Bucky had faced his personal struggles and set them aside, saving God knew how many lives. Steve had buried himself in a placebo Wall and tried to work himself into forgetfulness. 

Did Bucky know that? If he didn’t, he would soon. Steve would tell him if no one else did. Steve had no illusions that he could hide that from Bucky. Even if he’d wanted to, the drift would make it irrelevant. Bucky would see every part of Steve in the drift. That had never scared Steve before, but suddenly he remembered what Commander Hill had said to him that first week at Allied, all those many years ago.

Fury eyed Steve warily. “Do I need to get the doc up here with something to help you sleep?”

“Thought we didn’t have a doc,” Steve said weakly, struggling against a sudden fear of having gotten Bucky back just to lose him again.

“We do now,” Fury said. “One of the drift scientists from Red Shatterdome is also a medical doctor. Banner. He can prescribe – “

“No,” Steve cut him off. He took a deep breath. “No, thank you,” he repeated, moderating his tone. “I need to think. I need to figure out…” he trailed off. _Everything._

Fury nodded. “All right, son, I can see that. But I’ll expect you to ask for meds, or anything else, if you need it. Clear?” 

“Yes, sir,” Steve said reflexively. He turned blindly back into his room, fumbling with the door to close it, and threw himself on his bed to stare at the plate steel ceiling. No stains here. Somehow it didn’t seem fair.

When Fury’s footfalls died away, he got back up and made his way to the overlook.

Now Steve was looking down at the Jaeger bay, but he wasn’t seeing it as it was now. He was seeing the old bay at Allied, feeling the phantom presence of Bucky at his side, trying to reconcile his memories of the boys they’d been with the men they were now. Trying to measure the man he’d become, and determine how well he stacked up with the Winter Soldier, the hero, the man who wore Bucky’s face. 

“Hey,” a voice said softly, breaking into his musings. Steve had no need to turn around; he knew who it was.

“Hey yourself,” Steve whispered.

Footfalls approached from behind. Steve thought, _He still walks the same. He still has the same stride._ “Mind if I join you?” Bucky asked.

Steve gestured to his right. Bucky’s old place. “Pull up some deck plating.”

A familiar huff of laughter, then the sound of Bucky settling into place. Finally Steve let himself turn his head and look. Bucky caught his gaze and grinned, open and unreserved. Late at night on the overlook, he didn’t seem like a legendary hero. He just seemed like Bucky. He was still in uniform, though he must have found time for a shower and a change, since this uniform was clean. Still, with its long sleeves and standard-issue neural interface gloves, the mechanical arm was camouflaged completely. The illusion of Steve’s partner was complete.

Bucky was looking back at Steve; Steve wondered what he saw. “I knew you’d be here,” Bucky said abruptly. “Or, well. Maybe ‘knew’ isn’t the right word. I just thought, _I want to talk to Steve,_ and then I walked here. And here you were.” He gave a hopeful little smile. “Maybe some of it’s coming back.”

“Maybe,” Steve said, trying not to sound too excited. He didn’t know if he’d managed it or not, but Bucky’s expression dimmed slightly. 

“I know this is weird for you,” Bucky said. “I know we can’t just fall back into place – ” he hesitated.

Steve wanted to say something into the awkward silence, but he couldn’t think of what. A few hours earlier he would have said _of course we can_. But Fury’s words were still ringing in his ears. _He’d probably roll over and hand you the lube._ The thought sank something in his stomach, and Steve felt ill. That wouldn’t be love, that would be – god, and Steve had almost walked right into that trap. He’d been looking for sleep, not sex. But if Bucky had rolled over and given Steve that sleepy smile, when they’d woke up together the next morning, would Steve have even thought twice?

Bucky looked down, staring at the gunmetal floor, and Steve realized the other man was nervous.

“You _will_ drift with me, right?” Bucky asked abruptly. Fear and hope were warring in his expressive eyes as he looked at Steve. “I know the psychosis thing is a lot to ask…”

The idea that Steve might be frightened by what was in Bucky’s head galvanized him into action. “I’ve drifted with you plenty, pal,” he said, dryly. “Never noticed I was any crazier coming out than going in.”

“That’s cause you always brought all the crazy in with you,” Bucky said absently, then blinked. “Huh.” 

Steve had to take a couple of deep breaths. “Guess some of it’s coming back?” 

“Maybe.” Bucky paused, studying him. Steve met his gaze as calmly as he knew how, and tried to choke off the part of him that kept searching desperately for recognition in that familiar/unfamiliar gaze. “And maybe it wouldn’t happen to you, because… you know what the doctors say, right? About me being caught in half-drift?” Steve nodded – yes, he knew. In between the day’s debriefings he’d gone to Tony and demanded to be taught, a lifetime’s worth of drift research condensed into a three-day crash course, trying to understand what had happened to Bucky to turn him into the Winter Soldier. “Well,” Bucky went on. “The doctors at Red Shatterdome never agreed with my theory, and I guess none of us ever thought there was a point anyway, since we all thought you – my old copilot – must be dead.” 

_Since no one responded to the bolo with my picture,_ he didn’t say, and Steve cursed himself out anew for going off and losing himself on the Wall. If he’d just stayed with the program, accepted Phillips’ invitation to Lehigh Trainingdome, he would have been there. He would recognized Bucky at once and been able to bring him home. Instead of leaving him for years out at Red Shatterdome while his copilots went mad and Steve drove supports into a meaningless Wall.

“But I always believed that if I could just find you, you could fix me,” Bucky said, turning faith-bright eyes onto Steve.

Steve swallowed. _I don’t deserve that,_ he wanted to say. But if Bucky needed him… “How?” Steve asked, ready in that moment to do whatever it took.

“Drift with me,” Bucky repeated. “The problem is that our last drift ended badly, right? We didn’t come out of it together. You got out okay, I guess, but I didn’t. I’m stuck. It’s why everyone can drift with me – I’m already drifting, all the time. My problem is I can’t stop.”

_Can’t stop_ , Steve thought, horrified.  _Already drifting, all the time._ That wasn’t just early psychosis, that sounded like the final stages. Tony had told him about that, too, when he’d found out that Doc Foster had apparently soft-pedaled the long-term side effects. The sufferer – _Bucky_ – would experience the world like it was the half-reality of the drift. Nothing seeming quite substantial, nothing exactly where or what it seemed to be. No sense of object permanence. The inability to distinguish the real from the imagined.

“Of course the doctors say there isn’t a cure for that,” Bucky said earnestly. “But I always thought that if I could ever find you – if you’d survived somehow – and we could drift together again, we could finish what we started. Both of us go in and both of us come out. Right? Like it should have been. And then I’ll be myself again.” He laughed, exuberant. “Maybe I’ll even get my memories back.”

Steve nodded dumbly. It made sense. It had never been done before, but hell, none of this had ever been done before. Drift technology hadn’t existed until five years ago. Most Jaeger pilots were killed before drift psychosis advanced to its final stages – hell, most pilots were killed by the very fault in drift technology that caused the psychosis in the first place. But what Bucky was saying made sense. It could work. It _should_ work.

And it was something Steve could do for Bucky, something of value he could offer to the hero his partner had become.

“Of course I’ll drift with you,” Steve said, proud of the way his voice kept steady. “It’s always been you and me, buddy, until the end of the line.” He stood up, tugging Bucky with him by the simple expedient of refusing to let go of his hands.

“I’ll talk to Fury,” he promised. “Get us bumped to the top of the training rotation. We’ll get in a Jaeger, and then we’ll get you fixed.”

* * *

“No.”

Steve stared at Fury in shock. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean that I will not move you and Barnes to the top of the training rotation.”

This was not how he’d expected this conversation to go. After talking with Bucky last night, Steve had gone back to the terminal in his quarters and pulled up the pilot training rotation. With only three other pilot teams in the ‘dome, he’d figured it would only be a day or so before he and Bucky reached the top of the list and got to take _Lucky Devil_ out for a shakedown.

He’d been in for a surprise, then, not finding _Lucky Devil_ on the list at all. Thinking it was an oversight, Steve had tracked Fury down, finally finding him just leaning on the rail of the Jaeger bay overlook, watching the activity. He’d thought it would just be a simple matter of reminding Fury they needed to be added to the list.

What did Fury mean _no_? 

“But – “ Steve tried.

“I will not, in fact, place you on the drop rotation at all,” Fury cut him off. “Or do you not remember the part where I told you I wanted you to keep your distance from the Winter Soldier?”

“That was when he was the _Winter Soldier_ ,” Steve argued. “He’s Bucky!”

“Drifting with the Winter Soldier causes psychosis, remember?” Fury growled. “Don’t see how that’s gonna change just because we know his real name now.”

“But – ” Steve said again.

“Don’t give me any crap about how you need to build your rapport. _You’re_ the one who said the Soldier was your old copilot. Thought you two had plenty of rapport already.” Fury raised an eyebrow, and Steve had the grace to blush.

“If you know that,” Steve said after a moment, consciously moderating his tone, “then you know that we’ve got to get back in a Jaeger as soon as possible.”

Fury leaned back against the overlook’s railing and sighed. “Hill and I went way back,” he explained, a faraway look appearing in one eye. “She told me about you two – told me about all her pilots, of course, but always said you were the best.”

“Thanks to a lot of training,” Steve pointed out.

“She also told me what happened to you after Barnes was KIA. That you tried to find another compatible pilot. That, when you couldn’t, you wouldn’t stay on, even when Phillips offered you a training position.”

“Why’d she tell you that?”

“She knows I like to keep an eye on my pilots.” Steve snorted at this, but Fury just nodded. “You’re all my pilots, son. I kept tabs on you after you left the program, or didn’t you wonder how I knew to find you on the Wall?”

“I gave them my real name. Wouldn’t’ve been hard.”

“Do you know how many Steve Rogerses there are in the world?” Fury let the one corner of his mouth tick up in a smile. “Had to be sure I was getting the right one.” 

“Thanks, I guess,” Steve said after a moment. “But I still think Bucky and I need at least one practice drop before you throw us up against a real kaijuu.” He paused, deliberating over whether to say more. Would telling Fury Bucky’s theory of half-drift help convince him? Or would it just confirm to Fury that Bucky was dangerous to Steve?

Fury’s sigh interrupted his internal debate. “I know you think you’re immune to whatever messes up Barnes’ drift partners,” he said. “But I have nothing but your gut to back that up with, and my gut’s not so sure. I have to deal with the possibility that one drop is all I get out of you two.”

“You think he’ll drive me crazy?” Steve looked at Fury in surprise, then laughed. “If Bucky were gonna drive me nuts he’d’ve done it already.”

“Just the same. I can’t take the chance.” Fury nodded, then started to walk away, a clear sign that the conversation was over.

“But if that’s what you think,” Steve said to his retreating back, “then you’ll never let us out at all, will you? Because we might only have one shot, so you’ll hold us back until you’re sure you need us.”

Fury slowed, turned slightly, and nodded. “You’ve got a decent grasp of the realities of the situation.”

“You didn’t pull me here to do nothing,” Steve argued. 

“Didn’t pull you here to die for no reason, either.” He was almost to a corner.

“We’re not _gonna_ die.”

“Prove it,” Fury called back over his shoulder. Then he rounded the corner, and he was gone.

Steve blew out a frustrated sigh. Then a thought occurred to him, and he smiled. 

Fury probably didn’t think there was any way to prove that a drift could be safe without actually drifting, because that was the way it had been done – the only way it _could_ be done – since the invention of drift technology. But then again, Fury didn’t hang around Tony’s lab as an alternative to beating up punching bags. If Tony’s proposed new drift compatibility test really could do what it promised, then maybe there was a way to give Fury the proof he needed after all. 

If nothing else, Tony would be happy to get another guinea pig.

Steve grinned to himself and went to beard the mad inventor in his lair.

* * *

 

[Steve, Tony, Bruce and Bucky gather to run tests.] 

“Hey, Steve, hang on,” Tony interrupted, making grabby hands at Steve’s shirt. Steve let him have it, startled.

“What?”

“Can’t you stay?”

“I guess so?” Steve glanced back and forth between Bruce and Tony. “Why?”

Tony was holding up some awfully large suction cups and looking beseeching. “Remember the part where I need both of your baseline profiles to check compatibility?”

Bucky chuckled. “Fair’s fair, Stevie.”

“Uhhh,” Steve said.

Five minutes later, Steve was covered in medical monitoring equipment and being instructed to take deep breaths and stay relaxed.

“So, what exactly is this supposed to measure?”

“Our current drift tests are woefully imprecise,” Tony said, dropping into lecture mode seemingly automatically. “We do a great job at identifying capability, but a terrible job at identifying compatibility. At the program’s heyday we had nearly a hundred trained pilots who were cooling their heels in the reserves because we couldn’t screen them against each other for compatibility fast enough.”

“Not to mention we couldn’t screen them against the rest of the population,” Bruce added.

“Right. The original thinking was that, first, we test the whole population for drift capability, then, second, we test the drift capable pilots against each other for compatibility. Well, that went south right from the start – ” 

“Wait, the whole population?” Steve interjected, stunned. “We were all supposed to be tested?”

“All twelve billion of us,” Bruce confirmed. He shrugged, rueful. “In retrospect, that was a little optimistic.”

“Universal drift testing was dead on arrival,” Tony agreed. “We didn’t even succeed in screening the entire armed forces, much less the entire population.” 

“No kidding,” Bucky said. “I was in the regulars, and no one even mentioned testing.” 

“At least, not until I convinced my old base commander to transfer him to the program, because I knew we’d be compatible,” Steve finished.

“See?” Tony said. “I don’t even want to think about how many drift-capable people are out there who never even got screened. Dad’s formula estimated that a quarter of drift-capable people would be drift-compatible with no one, right? Well, over _half_ of the people who tested positive to get into pilots’ trials never matched with anyone else to actually get out into the fight. We’ve had pilot shortages right from the start, and we were never able to get out from under that.”

“That’s why the new drift tests Tony’s working on – ”

“ _We’re_ working on, Bruce,” Tony interrupted.

Bruce nodded. “Why the new drift tests _we’re_ working on are so important. The idea is, we don’t just test whether someone can achieve drift, but we take a snapshot of their mind…”

“A drift fingerprint, for lack of a better term.” Tony.

“…and store it. Then we devise a series of compatibility measurements based on drift profiles. So, every time someone tests positive for drift capability…”

“…we can compare their profile against everyone currently in the program, and find them a match.”

“Even if their future copilot is half a world away.”

“So no more need for extensive compatibility trials,” Steve said, awed. “No more travelling around the world to try and find your copilot.”

“Bingo,” Tony said triumphantly.

“…at least in principle,” Bruce said cautiously. “We’ve got the drift fingerprint capturing technology working pretty well, but the match algorithms are still untested.” 

“Small sample size,” Tony explained ruefully. “We’ve fingerprinted everyone here, but that’s still only a couple hundred people – “

“A couple _hundred_?” Bucky interrupted. “I thought Commander Fury said there were only six pilot teams here – ” 

“Oh, there are, we’re just fingerprinting everyone on base. Most of them have never been screened before.”

“No universal drift testing,” Bruce reminded Steve and Bucky.

“So, yeah, we’re working our way through the ‘dome,” Tony picked up, “but it’s not going to do us a lot of good. The only drift-capable people so far are the known pilots, and you’re all already matched.”

“It’s good control data,” Bruce said fairly. “We can make sure that the algorithms correctly match you with each other. But, as Tony says, we won’t really know that this is working until we find a new match.” 

“Well, it sounds like a worthy effort,” Bucky said. He shook his head. “The way things are out there right now – we were stretched pretty thin at Red, pilot-wise, and I know other Shatterdomes were even worse off.”

“We’re glad to participate,” Steve added. “And we’re getting something out of it too.” 

“Thanks for remembering I was working on this,” Tony said quietly. “I know I talk a lot, and I think most people just tune me out.”

“Their loss,” Bucky said fiercely.

“You said it,” Tony said with sudden brightness, reaching over to flip several switches. “You’re done! Bruce, unhook them?”

Steve rolled to a sitting position, rubbing at the spots on his skin where the suction cups had been as Bruce removed them, first from him, then from Bucky.

[Positive Results]

* * *

 

“The answer is still no, Rogers.” 

“But – ”

“We’ve been over this once already. My reasoning hasn’t changed.” Fury reached over to his desk and picked up the briefing file he’d been reading when Steve had barged into his office. “This conversation is over.”

“Dammit, listen to me,” Steve said, frustrated. “Yes, of course it’s a risk. But isn’t the potential gain worth it?”

Fury tipped his head to one side. “I’m listening.” 

Steve gaped at him for a second – he’d been sure Fury was going to ignore him – then hastily got his ideas together. “If I’m right, and I’m not vulnerable to the psychosis, then Bucky and I are the best team you’ve got. Can you afford to keep us benched because you’re afraid?”

“Reasonable doubt isn’t the same as fear.” Fury raised an eyebrow. “And I think some of the other pilots might object to hearing that _you’re_ the best team I’ve got. _Asgardian Hammer_ has more kills, and 

[+] 

* * *

[More on Clint, the other pilots, bump him into Coulson]

* * *

[Steve and Bucky sneak into their Jaeger. Sorry, Fury.] 

Bucky’s mind had been Brooklyn at noon, blazing and brilliant and soft around the edges. The Winter Soldier’s mind was a desert at night: vast, cold, and alien. It was beautiful. The ground stretched beneath his feet in all directions to the horizon, gaping fissures like mouths where it had cracked for lack of water under the heat of the desert sun. Only the occasional straggling weed still clung to life. There were no buildings, no refuse, no signs of human habitation. Over Steve’s head, the night sky stretched like a dome from east to west, faintly glowing with the light of stars.

Steve picked a direction and started walking.

He couldn’t say, afterwards, how long or how far he walked; it could have been a minute, it could have been a mile. But eventually he saw something in the distance, a dark shape that broke the unrelieved straightness of the  horizon line in his view. He turned slightly towards it and kept walking.

The shape proved, as he drew nearer, to be a rock formation. Even nearer, and he could see it wasn’t created by nature. Finally he stood next to it, and he could see that it was a giant hand, thrust out of the sand, palm up. The remnants of some great statue. Lying in the palm, flat on his back and staring at the sky, was the Winter Soldier.

“ _I am Ozymandias, king of kings_ ,” Bucky said softly, not turning his head. “ _Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”_

Steve blinked. “You don’t remember anything from before your accident, except you can quote some random poem we learned in high school?”

Bucky looked over. “We learned that in high school?”  
  
“Yeah,” Steve said, lifting himself up to sit next to Bucky, lean back against the statue’s curled-up fingers. “English class.” 

“I don’t remember that,” Bucky admitted. “I read it again after the accident. Did a lot of reading. Was that something I liked before?”

Steve grinned a little. “Not really.”

Bucky glanced at him sideways, then looked back out across the desert. “What was I like before the accident?”

Steve slid down the statue until he was prone, next to Bucky, and rested his head on Bucky’s shoulder. “Like yourself,” he said finally. “Memories don’t make you who you are.”

“Maybe not, but something about me sure did change.” Bucky gestured out across the still expanse of the desert. “I bet my driftscape didn’t look like this, before.”

“No,” Steve had to admit, thinking of sunlit streets, buildings stretching to meet the sky, a sandlot at noon. “Not really.” 

Bucky let his hand drop, then rolled onto his side, facing Steve, propping himself up on an elbow. In here, Steve noticed suddenly, both arms were real. “What did it look like?”

Steve bit his lip and glanced out over the desert to buy himself a moment to think. Coming from anyone else, that question would have been unforgivably personal and most certainly taboo. Drifting was the most intimate thing Steve and Bucky had ever done together, and that was taking into account the several years when they’d been horny teenage boys living together in Brooklyn with minimal adult supervision.

Steve hadn’t talked _about_ Bucky in years. It was the only thing that let him function. His memories were buried deep inside of him. Not quietly – they screamed at him at night, as Bucky had screamed when the _Zola_ -class tore him apart – but Steve had spent a lot of time learning to be deaf. “If we’re a good enough team,” he said finally, “maybe you’ll see it in my head one day.” 

“Challenging me, Rogers?” The Winter Soldier studied him. “ _What wound did ever heal but by degrees?_ ”

“More about the king of kings?”

“Shakespeare.” Bucky shrugged, rolled to a sitting position. “Well. Here we are, drifting together.” 

“Yep,” Steve agreed laconically, still reclined.

“You don’t seem to be going nuts quite yet,” Bucky observed, mock-seriously.

Steve glanced around. “Doesn’t seem that unfriendly to me.” 

Bucky grinned, showing his teeth. “Then let’s see if they’ll let us kick some kaijuu ass.” 

Steve nodded, then closed his eyes, waking up.

* * *

 

Fury was, well, furious. There was really no other way to put it, Steve thought, as he stood at attention and tried to look contrite. Next to him, Bucky was doing the same. Fury’s office wasn’t particularly large, and with the way Fury was pacing, the two pilots had to stand fairly close together. The brush of Bucky’s shoulder against his was far more distracting than either Steve’s own thoughts or Fury’s rant.

[Fury expresses his Displeasure.]

“...You two are going to walk out of this office and go _straight_ to medical. You are going to let Banner and Stark run any test they please. You are going to stay there as long as they please. If they want you to jump, you will say _how high._ And you will do this after every single drift, so that I am one hundred percent sure you are not jeopardizing yourselves, your Jaeger, and the future of the _entire fucking planet_. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” 

“And the minute there’s a problem,” Fury seethed, pointing at them both, “the minute there is so much as a blip, so help me God you two are so grounded you’ll never see daylight again. _Is that clear?”_

“Clear, sir,” Steve and Bucky chorused. Fury stared at them, then dropped into his chair, burying his head in his hands.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said, muffled. 

They did.

They headed straight for medical, sneaking each other glances like they were kids who’d just escaped a scolding, and headed for medical as ordered. 

“Well?” Tony demanded as soon as they walked in.

The pilots shared another glance.

“We’re on the active roster,” Bucky announced gleefully.

“ _If_ we comply with the absolute letter of the pilots’ rulebook,” Steve added, hopping up onto an exam table and starting to unbutton his uniform shirt. “Medical after every mission, drift tests, the whole enchilada.”

Bruce and Tony shared a look of their own. Then, slowly, they grinned, and advanced on their patients.

[ _They’re both okay, but Bucky’s not magically fixed.]_  

Stark and Banner both insisted on checking Steve’s readings three times before they were convinced there hadn’t been a malfunction, and Bruce kept Steve overnight in the medical ward besides. Tony told him later that he showed almost no signs of drift trauma. “Or at least no _new_ signs,” Tony amended. “You’re still trying to achieve drift at random times, but you’re also still going right back to normal afterwards.”

“Isn’t that good?” Steve said, glancing over his shoulder. Bucky was down in the training bay with Bruce, gathering additional drift readings, and Steve was itching to join them. But Tony had asked Steve to stay for one additional test, and, mindful of Fury’s patience, Steve hadn’t insisted.

“Of course it is,” Tony said. “Though don’t get too excited. Half of the pilots Bucky drifted with while he was on vacation in sunny Siberia didn’t show any trauma after the first drift either.”

Steve laughed a little, amazed that he _could_ laugh. Tony’s irreverence should have been jarring – he knew most of the other Shatterdome personnel found it so – but Steve appreciated the levity. More, he appreciated the way Tony always said _Bucky_ instead of _the Winter Soldier_. Most of the other people in the ‘dome had never heard of some kid from Brooklyn named Bucky Barnes, but they’d sure as hell heard of the Winter Soldier, and they swung between an embarrassing awe for the miracle pilot and a frightened skittishness, like drift psychosis was catching. Every time they did it something went blank behind Bucky’s eyes. Steve hated it, and he was grateful for everyone who treated Bucky like an ordinary human being.

“But forget your trauma scores,” Tony was saying. “What’s more interesting is your compatibility.”

“What?” Steve frowned. “Was it down?” 

Tony shook his head. “Up! Even after three years without practice, a botched exit to your last drift, and Bucky getting hit with the hammer of forgetfulness. I would’ve expected some bumps, but it looks like you two just went right back into it.”

“Uh… good?”  
  
“ _Good_ doesn’t begin to cover it. _Great_ comes closer.” Tony pointed to the monitor again, tracing a line that stayed steady and strong at the top of the display. “You’re pegged right at the top of the scale. I can’t even tell you how well you’re really doing; I’d have to build a more sensitive test set.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Steve murmured. Tony flicked him a look; Steve shrugged. “My drift trials,” he explained. “Apparently I pegged the scale there too. Fitz and Simmons were talking about needing to recalibrate the scale.”

“I remember that,” Tony said, startled. “Didn’t know it was you, but they sent me those results. I ended up reengineering the entire thing, not just the high end. Resulted in a three percent increase in the pass rate – turned out some pilots were falling through the cracks before, not showing as drift capable even though they were.”

“Glad I could help?” Steve tried.

“But getting back to these results – Steve, it’s nuts,” Tony insisted. “No one has tested above average with the Winter Soldier on record. He can drift with everyone reliably but no one well. And for showing no signs of trauma – it’s not unheard of, but given your preexisting condition, I was expecting to see _something_.”

Tony was looking at Steve like he was worried, like he thought Steve was hiding something, damage where their tests couldn’t see it. He wasn’t, but Steve knew better than to tell that to Tony, who was wise to the standard run of pilots’ tricks and would take any denial of issues as evidence to the contrary.

Tony had been around Jaeger pilots his whole life. His father had pioneered drift technology, in the early days of the breach. Howard and Maria had been the first test cases for co-drifting, and they’d piloted the first Jaeger together, defeating a kaijuu in San Francisco and proving to the WSC that Jaegers and drift technology were effective.

Mere months later, Howard and Maria made history a second time by being the first Jaeger pilots to die. The hidden flaw in first-generation drift technology had manifested when they’d pushed _Iron Man_ to its limits against the first  _Obadiah-_ class kaijuu to come through the breach, killing them both mid-drift.

So Tony would get where Steve was coming from. The shock of loss, the ensuing, unfixable loneliness, the drive to do anything and everything you could to compensate for it. Tony would be all too ready to believe that Steve would push himself to get back into the drift. Tony, who had seen  _Iron Man_ fall from the sky, watching from the safety his father’s lab in what would become the first Shatterdome. He’d devoted his life to fixing the drift flaw that had killed his parents. Run the entire research and development arm for the entire Jaeger program since Howard and Maria’s deaths, and he was still here, now, at the end of things, holding down the labs at SHIELD Shatterdome and trying for one last miracle.

He’d gotten to know Steve now, too, and Steve had come to realize that under the prickly exterior, Tony was remarkably sharp-sighted. He knew that Bucky being alive was Steve’s personal miracle, and that Steve would do anything for Bucky. Tony therefore knew perfectly well that if there had been drift damage his tests hadn’t detected, Steve _would_ have been hiding it. Bucky wanted to drift with Steve. _Needed_ , maybe, to drift with Steve. And Steve was damn well going to make that happen.

And Tony was looking at Steve, now doubly worried because of Steve’s long silence, waiting for a reply.

“As long as they let us drift,” Steve said finally. “That’s all I care about.”

“I know,” Tony murmured, but Steve was already leaving.


	4. Chapter 4

_When the man who will become the Winter Soldier wakes up, he hears a cacophony of mechanical noises, beeping and shrieking and signaling their masters. It takes him a minute to realize the sound isn’t a scream. Then he wonders why he expected to hear screaming._  

_In the time it takes him to realize that he’s in some kind of medical facility, men and women in white coats are swarming around him._

_They ask him his name. He can’t tell them._

_They tell him he’s in Red Shatterdome, that he’s been unconscious for a year. That they were ready to give up on him numerous times, that he had failed every traditional test for brain activity._

_He asks why they hadn’t pulled the plug._

_They tell him that there was another test he hadn’t failed: the drift test. The entire year he’d spent unconscious he’d been in drift limbo. His body has healed, except for his left arm, which is missing – gone – and he stares at where it should be with his eyes, even as his mind runs in circles looking for the person who should be on the other end of a stable drift. He’s half a man, in mind and body._

_They say he was brought in alone, badly injured, by a group of fishermen off the coast. He’d been wearing the remains of a Jaeger’s pilot suit, but there had been no sign of a Jaeger, no debris, no co-pilot dead or alive. They say they are sorry, but they don’t know who he is – they’ve sent his picture out to every Shatterdome left standing, but no one has been able to give him an answer. They had been hoping, now that he’s woken up, that he can tell them who he is._

_He doesn’t know._

* * *

_They don’t intend to put the man who will become the Winter Soldier back into a Jaeger. He’s caught in a permanent state of half-drift. Reality seems dreamlike to him, and for the first month he’s often found roaming the Shatterdome halls, looking for his missing other half, the person who used to drift with him, the person who can make this drift complete. He never finds them, of course. He’s looking in reality, which is the wrong place. He tells the doctors that, tells them he needs to drift, but they tell him it’s not possible. Caught halfway as he is, he’ll never be able to drift again._

_One day one of them looks at him sadly, and sits him down, and tells him bluntly that his copilot must be dead. Must have been with one of the Shatterdomes that was destroyed while he lay unconscious here in Russia, or else someone would have responded by now to the picture Red Shatterdome sent out trying to find his identity. He’ll never find his other half. He’ll live the rest of his life like this, cold and alone, searching for something that doesn’t exist anymore._

_He’s contemplating the best way to end his life when the all-alert sounds._

_He knows, intellectually, that he can’t do anything. There aren’t any spare Jaegers, nor any solo pilots looking for a drift partner. And he couldn’t drift with them even if there were. He knows they wouldn’t even let him try._

_He runs anyway. Instinct is too strong._

_He runs to the drift bays. Then he stands there, watching. He doesn’t have a locker that’s his, a partner that’s his, a Jaeger that’s his. He’s got nothing to do but watch._  

_He’s still watching when the kaijuu punches straight through_ Black Widow _, killing Tanya Anisimova instantly. He’s part of the rescue crews that drag Natalia Romanova out of the wreckage, helps them haul her into medical. He’s there when she wakes up, and he sees the same thing in her eyes that’s in his, now._

_While he was waiting for Romanova to wake up, he’d been wandering the pathways in his mind, learning the way through the eternal half-drift that was now his life, sleeping and waking. Before, all of the paths had led to nothingness, to the hole in his psyche where his drift partner should have been. But now there is one path that leads somewhere else. There is one path that leads to revenge. Kaijuu have taken his partner from him. He wants – and it is a novel thing for him to want – to take everything from them, in return._

_Romanova is out of medical in a month._ Black Widow _’s repair takes two. Not long enough for the Shatterdome’s commander to find a replacement pilot who can drift with Romanova. But long enough for him to figure out how to override the drop controls from the drift bay._

_The next time the all-alarm sounds, he jumps into the drift bay with Romanova, and they drop together._

* * *

_The doctors are astonished. He and Romanova had drifted seamlessly, connecting on the first attempt and sustaining acceptable levels of alpha waves despite never even having practiced together. It shouldn’t have been possible._

_They run more tests. They can’t explain it. After a full week, the base commander comes in and orders a different set of tests: drift compatibility, with every pilot in the ‘dome._

_He passes them all. Commander Heimdall is ecstatic. It’s a dream come true: a pilot who can drift with any other pilot. The doctors refer the data to the scientists. They pore over it day and night. Tony Stark talks with him over long-distance lines, studying the same data from his lab in America. Finally they conclude that the half-drift state, far from preventing him from ever drifting again, is having the opposite effect. Pilots need a strong level of mental compatibility to initiate drift; but he – the half pilot, the partner who is not – he never needs to initiate drift. He is_ always  _drifting. And so anyone may drift with him._

_He’s fitted with a prosthetic arm that can withstand the stresses of Jaeger piloting. It’s stainless steel, visibly mechanical, with no effort made to disguise the fact that it’s not an original part of him. It’s heavier than it should be and he has to learn a whole new way of moving, walking, standing – just after he’d learned all those things over again once, to compensate for the arm’s loss. But the prosthetic will let him pilot a Jaeger, let him kill kaiju, and that’s all he cares about._

_When he’s functional with the prosthetic, Commander Heimdall puts he and Natalia on the active duty roster as official pilot partners. Then Heimdall tells the new pilot to choose a name – “We’ve got to put_ something  _on your paperwork, after all.”_

_“No,” the pilot says. Heimdall looks up, startled. He goes on: “Whatever you’ve been using – just keep using that. Please.”_

_“You should have a real name,” Heimdall says, not unkindly._

_“I do,” he says. “I don’t want any other.”_

_Heimdall spreads his hands in a gesture of loss. “But you don’t know what it is.”_

_The pilot hesitates a moment. It’s hard to speak the amorphous thoughts that are beginning to emerge from the fog of his constant half-drift, but he thinks if he can tell anyone, it’s the base’s commander. Heimdall has been in a Jaeger, has lost a co-pilot. An entire corps of potential co-pilots. He’s the only pilot still living who’d ever climbed into a mark one Jaeger, survivor of the kaiju attacks and early drift technology that killed everyone else in his cohort. He’ll understand._

_“When the war is over,” the pilot says. He has to stop and clear his throat. “When the war is over, I’m going to find out who I am. I know the other Shatterdomes didn’t have an ID,” he adds quickly when Heimdall moves to speak. “But there may be other records. School records – I may have finished school before the breach. Or military records. Maybe I served elsewhere before joining the Jaeger program. Maybe I have family somewhere. I’m going to search for my real name. And I don’t want another one in the meanwhile.”_

_Heimdall sighed. “I understand that,” he says, “and I respect it. But I still have to call you something. It doesn’t have to be a name. Pick something else. A title. A quote you like. Something from a book.”_

_“I know I must have read books before I came here,” he admits quietly, “but I can’t remember them.”_

_Heimdall opens a drawer behind his desk and tosses something at the pilot. A book. “You can borrow this,” he says. “Just bring it back.”_

_It’s the collected writings of an American named Thomas Paine. Three days later, when the pilot returns it, he tells Heimdall to call him the Winter Soldier._  

* * *

_The Winter Soldier had hoped that drifting with Romanova – Natalia – would help him. That a stable drift, ended cleanly, would cure his half-drifting state._

_It doesn’t. Regretfully he concludes – and the Shatterdome doctors agree – that only drifting with his original partner could accomplish that. Other pilots like Natalia can enter the drift with him and leave it again, but the drift never really ends. Not for him._

_It helps in other ways, though. Natalia is good. They work surprisingly well together. He even comes to be fond of her, somewhat. He clings to every emotion he experiences as alternatives to the blankness that pervades him otherwise. When he’s blank, he wants only to kill kaijuu, but he doesn’t count that as an emotion, just a fact of life. Everyone in the Shatterdome wants to kill kaijuu._

_He and Natalia kill many. He goes out with other pilots, too, sometimes, when Natalia is injured, or when_ Black Widow _is down for repairs. Pilots aren’t supposed to be comfortable operating an unfamiliar Jaeger without extensive practice, but once again the Winter Soldier is the exception to all the rules. Before he knows it, he’s gained something of a reputation. The miracle pilot._

_The problem – the reason the Winter Soldier is so valuable – is one not just of drift of compatibility but of Jaeger compatibility. The fundamental revision to drift technology between the mark three and mark four Jaegers means no one with a type one implant can pilot a mark four (or later) Jaeger. The pilots who’d tried to take a second implant had all died on the operating table. It doesn’t matter if the first implant is healthy, damaged, or even removed; first comes shock, then total systemic collapse, then finally death. Eventually Stark simply refuses to try again. Whether it’s because of an incompatibility between the type one and two implants themselves, or whether it’s simply that no human body could stand two implantation surgeries, the result is the same. The later waves of Jaeger pilots can’t operate the older Jaegers._

_But the pilots are dying faster than the Jaegers are being destroyed; the human body is so much more fragile than ones made of circuits and steel, so much less reparable. Despite this, the World Security Council decides against fitting new pilots with the type one implants to extend the working lifetime of surviving early model Jaegers. They say the older models were dangerous to pilots, and pilots are too scarce a commodity to put into old-model Jaegers unless they already have the compatible implants. The Winter Soldier can’t even say they’re wrong, but no base commander can stand letting functional Jaegers sit on the sidelines for want of a pilot. The Winter Soldier is the answer to those prayers. Over time, as word of the Winter Soldier’s abilities spread, all of the surviving older-model Jaegers make their way to Red Shatterdome, along with their surviving pilots. Over time, the Winter Soldier drifts with all of them._

_When he’s not out on missions, the ‘dome scientists beg Commander Heimdall and the Soldier to be allowed to allowed to run more tests. If they can figure out how the Soldier’s half-drift works, maybe it can be replicated safely. Maybe even engineered into a third generation of Jaeger interface implants. Such an advance could change the face of the war. They could wipe out the kaijuu forever with a dozen more just like him._

_He doesn’t understand why anyone would want to be like him, but he understands wanting to win the war, so he agrees. Natalia agrees, too; they want to see if drifting with him has had any effect on her, made her more receptive to multiple drift partners._

_For six months her tests are normal, and the scientists are disappointed._

_Then her tests are suddenly not normal anymore._

* * *

_The doctors pull Natalia from the duty roster and run emergency checks on all of the other pilots who had ever drifted with him. Several of them are also showing signs of psychosis and mental degradation, despite having drifted with him many fewer times than Natalia. Some of the pilots who show symptoms have drifted with him only once. And there’s a sudden, ugly subcurrent to the suicide of a pilot he’d drifted with in Bangkok during an emergency call. Suicide among Jaeger pilots is not unheard of, though most commit suicide by kaijuu instead of taking a knife to their throat and wrists. But the dead pilot had been found wandering the halls at night several times before her death, and the doctors at Pax Shatterdome reported that she’d been calling out for someone she’d been apparently unable to find._

_He is the common element. He is the cause. He’s not a miracle – he’s a poison pill._

_Commander Heimdall becomes a man trapped in an impossible dilemma. He’s been making more use of the Winter Soldier’s extraordinary capabilities as time goes by, because with the passing of time comes the death of pilots, and the death of the remaining pilots with type one implants leaves more cockpits empty and more Jaegers standing idle while kaijuu attack._

_Now Heimdall plays Russian Roulette with staff assignments, slotting the Winter Soldier into the cockpits of old-model Jaegers and waiting to see if this is the mission his co-pilot comes back from insane. He simply can’t leave any of the remaining old-model Jaegers sitting idly while people are dying, and as the frequency and intensity of kaijuu incursions increase, people are so often dying._

_The pilots who drop with the Winter Soldier are volunteers, all of them. Some of them are willing to do anything to protect surviving family and friends. Some have no one left alive to protect, and are simply doing the only thing they can while they wait for death to come. The former group step up to the drift bay with stiff spines and gritted teeth, steeling themselves to roll the dice. The latter group drop eagerly, embracing their inevitable decline. But both are, technically, volunteers._

_None of that makes the Winter Soldier feel better. He doesn’t imagine it comforts Heimdall, either, but the commander keeps sending them out regardless._

* * *

_Once the psychosis discovery is made, it doesn’t take long for things to come to a head. It’s almost as if knowing the risks of drifting with him make the side effects appear faster. He and Natalia had drifted together for six months’ worth of missions, plus regular training, before her readings had diverged from baseline. After she’s taken off the roster permanently, Commander Heimdall drafts a drift rotation that spreads him among his cohort of old-model Jaeger pilots on a mission-by-mission basis. He stops practicing with a copilot, spending all of his time in the drift simulator instead – not that it had ever really mattered, since he hasn’t needed to ’learn’ a new Jaeger the way everyone else does since he’d woken up from the accident that had landed him at Red Shatterdome. But despite all of these precautions, his copilots start developing side effects at a prodigious rate._

_By this point, though, it almost doesn’t matter. They’re down to only a handful of early-model Jaegers still functioning. Damage that would have been fixable a year ago is total now, as the supply of spare parts dwindles and manufacturing capabilities become totally devoted to new-model Jaegers. Between the failure of the mark fives and the usual attrition rate for the mark fours, which are now over three years old, all remaining production capacity focuses exclusively on the mark six. At the rate they’re going, it could be only weeks before there are no more early-model Jaegers for the Winter Soldier to pilot._

_[the destruction of Red Shatterdome, the escape, heading for SHIELD]_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And finally, here are my summary notes for all the thousands of words that remain unwritten:
> 
> _the big climax; everyone gears up for the final battle; things go slightly sideways; Steve and Bucky are stuck in their Jaeger and in an inert drift; they dig deep until they find Bucky, guarded by a shade of young!Steve; they have an emotional reunion; then they save the world._
> 
> (Sorry. I'm wordy except when I'm not, I guess.)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
